Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sunybcs!bingvaxu!leah!itsgw!batcomputer!chow
From: chow@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Christopher Chow)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Init Manager, please
Message-ID: <3184@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: 15 Dec 87 03:48:16 GMT
References: <338@spectrix.UUCP> <22163@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: chow@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Christopher Chow)
Organization: Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY
Lines: 74

In article <22163@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster) writes:
>In article <338@spectrix.UUCP> jmm@spectrix.UUCP (John Macdonald) writes:
::I would like to see an Init Manager.  It should be able to run a
::dialogue that I will call the Init Chooser.
:: [ much deleted, read it, it is interesting.]
:
:I certainly hope Apple does _not_ waste any time writing this. What a horrible
:idea!
:
:1.) You don't need it to mark an INIT as not to be run.
:
:If you don't want an INIT to run the next time you boot, drag it out of the
:system folder!

If you happen to be trying to figure what combinations of inits are crashing
your system then dragging things in and out of the system folder is a slow
way of doing things.  Plus, suppose you're hard disk has a init which causes
you Mac to crash on boot.  If you had an INIT manager type package then you
can simply tell the offending INIT not to load.  Currently, you're stuck
unless you can boot off another device.

:
:2.) You not only don't need it to sequence INITs, but that isn't the
:right way to solve the problem. The right solution is: Get that buggy
:software fixed, and you already have a workaround that works while you
:are waiting.

Agreed.  But in real-life that could be a problem.

:3.) The proposed design doesn't help when you are booting from a disk
:with a collection of incompatible INITs.
:
:You may have trouble booting your machine because of an INIT conflict.
:An INIT Manager that runs after the system is up won't help here.
:Most INITs have the feature that if you hold down some combination of
:the chift, control and option keys while the machine is booting, the
:INIT will just return without doing anything. These shift-sequences
:are clearly documented in the manuals.

Yeah, but what happens when you have a series of inits which won't load
if the shift key is down and you're only trying to prevent one of them
from loading.  Do you think you can predict correctly when to hold and
release the shift key :-)?


:It is a bad idea because it increases the complexity of the user
:interface. The more things like Font/DA Movers we have, the less that
:a niave user can just do in the Finder, the more confusing and hard to
:use the Macintosh becomes. If there already is a good simple way of
:doing something, it just confuses people to give them another way. The
:Macintosh achieved its current popularity in large part because of its
:ease of use.  I want the Macintosh to continue to be a success. Let's
:keep it easy. If the user can do something just be moving around a few
:files, then let's let him. That way he is using techniques he
:already knows well, and doesn't have to remember how to use a program he uses

Yeah, but short cuts are useful to people who need them.  The Mac interface
is already populated with various short cuts.  People can be free to ignore
any short cut they don't want to use.  Its this type of minimialistic
thinking which lead Apple not to even identify in its docs of the Mac II the
"programmer's switch".

Of course, I'm biased in this issue, since I suggested something similar
about two months ago entitled "Init 31 should be rewritten" :-)


Christopher Chow
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