Re: GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.0: "Mighty Atom"

[textshell neutronstar dyndns org]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 01:45:43AM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="iain">
> 
> [...]
> 
> It comes down to a 'greatest common factor' of usefulness. IM apps can be
> found in most desktop environments now (Mac OS X, Windows, etc), as can
> media players (that's why everyone's jumping up and down so much about
> them), along with web browsers, email clients, etc., etc.
> 

I think this argument get a bit annoing, we really shouldn't base what's going
into the desktop on microsoft's and other buissness models (Office is a chashcow
so they'll keep it seperate, MSN should kill other IMs so that put it in, etc).
Anyway what's the real effect of something beeing in the Desktop release (exept
a bit more pressure to get things right(HIG, integration, a11y), but a
determined project can do it without). What really matters for the end user is
what distributions ship. And people downloading or even compiling from gnome.org
will be power user enought to make own decisions.

So we should maybe have a lean Desktop, and a lot of additional Applications for
the rest. Maybe put it in 5th toe.
But just citing macos of windows as this is what the desktop is not very useful.
Windows ships stuff that most users never use and excludes stuff that most
people have installed (Not using windows anymore, but a Zip archiver is a good
example. Most users need it, ms didn't ship it in win 98).

Maybe we should put stuff into the desktop release that, either:
	- everybody (who sticks to the Gnome philosophie) needs (panel,
	  filemanager, windowmanager, html renderer (with shell), etc).
	- small things not quite task specific that aid friends and powerusers
	  helping another get things done (zip/tgz archiver, other simple
	  tools, calculator.)
	- other small programms that are not enough a seperate programm to the
	  user that he would want to install them, but that are useful (zenity,
	  background programms for common enough  use cases (eg. laptop, screen
	  size changer, etc).
But even within these borders we would have a lot not to include in the long
term. I think everything that is a seperate Application to the user could live
outside of the Desktop release. For most of the with a syncronised release plan
so users can just get everything they need when to desktop is realised.


just my 2/100th of a currency.

Martin H.