Re: [Tails-dev] Removing the clock applet from the desktop

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Author: intrigeri
Date:  
To: The Tails public development discussion list
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Removing the clock applet from the desktop
Hi,

sajolida@??? wrote (03 Oct 2013 08:38:22 GMT) :
> There is also this "country" option from Tails Greeter. But I'm not sure
> we should use that, and we should probably get rid of it, and rather
> allow the timezone to be configured through your applet only.


Hmmm, I'm not sure I'm following you on that one. Perhaps I entirely
misunderstood what you are suggesting, so please take what follows
with a grain of salt :)

I think the region setting is a fine source of a "best bet" when it
comes to the default displayed timezone. Do we agree on this?

But also, I think the region setting is useful *in itself*, not just
for timezone selection: it's used to select a default keyboard layout
in the greeter, and it also determines various l10n and language
behaviors. So I don't think we could get rid of this region setting.

> Here is my logic for that: if there is a timezone stored in persistence,
> then that should overwrite the country option in the Greeter


Regardless of whether it's reasonable or not to deduce the region from
the configured timezone (that's debatable, I guess), there is
a problem with this: we only get to learn the persistent timezone
setting *after* having enabled persistence in the greeter, so anyone
who wants to benefit from the behavior you're suggesting would have to
either select their preferred keyboard layout every time anyway, or
type their passphrase with a US layout. Not too convincing a UX,
is it?

> (or otherwise the timezone in persistence will never be applied).


I don't get why this would be the case (and that's an indicator that
I may have misunderstood your point entirely).

To be clearer, what I'm thinking of is:

As a Tails user
When I boot Tails
And I select my preferred locale in the greeter
And I enable persistence
And I have no timezone configuration in my persistent volume
Then the displayed timezone is derivated from the country I have selected

and:

As a Tails user
When I boot Tails
And I select my preferred locale in the greeter
And I enable persistence
And I have a timezone configured in my persistent volume
Then the displayed timezone is set to the one configured in persistence

> And a good rationale to allow people configuring the timezone from your
> applet is that a user can fuck that up and correct it. If it is
> configured from the Greeter then there is no way back. Plus it is not
> strictly required to have this in the Greeter, so I'd rather have it
> configured from the place where it matters really ("that clock on the
> desktop is wrong, let's change that!") than having yet another option in
> the Greeter when it can be somewhere else.


In the current state of things (persistence configured in one place,
locale settings in another place and not persistent), I agree that's
probably the best we can do.

I also hope that at some point, the idea of unifying all that stuff in
one place (e.g. allow the user to configure persistence in the
greeter, and allow the user to configure greeter settings from the
same control panel inside the session once logged in) will be
researched in more depth and implemented, and then we'll probably want
to move the timezone configuration into this unified interface, but
let's keep that for later. UX experts, please catch this ball! :)

Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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