Re: comment about gnome architecture

[Alan <alan ufies org>]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 10:01:54AM +0000, Michael Meeks wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 02:05, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > On Sun, 2003-12-14 at 18:17, Greg Breland wrote:
> > > future.  Basically, "Build the infrastructure and the apps will
> > > follow".  I would love to see more focus on pure infrastructure.
> ...
> > Nowadays we seem to treat infrastructure as a means to an end, and the
> > results are much better (in fact, even the infrastructure is better).
> 
> 	This is all true; however - it seems totally clear to me, that unless
> we have a shared vision of where we want the infrastructure to go, and a
> shared set of requirements - we're going to end up with something that
> instead of slowly increasingly in coherents wastefully continues as a
> set of disparate, floating, badly coupled pieces.

As someone else posted as well, the issue isn't just about gnome, or gnome
and kde, or even desktop environments at all, but about the whole
system.  Right now if you want CDs to mount automatically when they are
inserted it's not something to do with nautilus or konq, but with the
kernel setup.  Not Our Problem(tm).  Other parts of the system are like
this as well, if you want fine grained permission control you need to
have support in the file manager, but the filesystem as well.  

As someone else mentioned, people don't buy a windows or mac machine
because they are good, but because everything works properly.  Under
os/x you can enable or disable journaling by a checkbox in the disk
utility program.  That's the sort of integration that would be nice in
linux (note I didn't say gnome or kde :)

However, the challenge is that linux is about choice, and creating "the
whole widget" goes against that, as does giving people the choice to
configure their own kernel for embedded devices or for servers (which
won't need/want auto-mounting media for example).  Having a good server
os and a good desktop os almost seem like they are opposing ideas in
that one wants complete customizability, and the other wants "the whole
widget".

alan

-- 
Alan <alan ufies org> - http://arcterex.net
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