[tahoe-dev] Tahoe-LAFS is widely misunderstood

[Chris Palmer]

James A. Donald writes:

> nvi is not exactly famous for user friendliness either.

I was talking about design and implementation complexity, not advocating
nvi's specific user interface. I hoped that would be obvious, since the
other examples were Emacs and cat.

Usability arises when the user's mental model of how the system works is
close enough to how it really works that the person can reason and intuit
how the system will behave. That means the system must be simple to have any
hope of being usable. nvi is simple, but not usable for unfortuante but
orthogonal reasons. Again, I had hoped this would be obvious.

> One should always start design from the user interface, and start design

Yes, I said that before in a previous email.

> > 1. It's a FUSE program. The end. You mount a filesystem,
> > and then browse around. The UI is whatever your current
> > filesystem UI is.
> 
> Mismatch.  Browsing works, but manipulation has subtle
> differences.

I think you'll agree that your current filesystem UI is sufficient, whatever
it is. I can see that I should have listed every possible operation in
addition to browse; in the future I will always say "browse around, delete
files and directories, rename files and directories, copy files and
directories, search for files and directories, share files and directories,
and cromulently frob files and directories."

You may now flame me for leaving out your favorite filesystem operation. :)


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