RE: 2.4: System Tools - Please try them

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Mon, 2003-06-02 at 01:01, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > From: Seth Nickell [mailto:snickell stanford edu] 
> > I have general concerns that the system tools I'm seeing are also not
> > really the ones that we have a big need for, and are often confusing.
> > That said, as I'm sure you all know, I'm a big fan of GNOME 
> > starting to
> > think of itself as an operating system and provide a uniform interface
> > to hardware/system settings, and gst seems like a good place to start.
> > 
> > "Boot" - maybe useful, but probably not something you'd have as a
> > seperate dialogue in a perfect world.
> > 
> > "Networking" - Great! Probably the most common system 
> > configuration task
> > (though less important when DHCP stuff just works, but it doesn't
> > always).
> >
> > 
> > "Runlevel" - A *services* focused dialogue would be awesome, much like
> > RH presents under "setup" where you can click and turn things on and
> > off. Mixing this with the traditional unix runlevels, and 
> > presenting it
> > as such in the menus, is confusing and gets in the way of what people
> > usually want to do, which is just to turn something on or off.
> > 
> > "Time" - great, but maybe doesn't need a menu item and should be just
> > under the right click menu of the clock applet.
> > 
> > "Users" - good to have, esp. if you're admining a machine
> 
> Sure. I don't think any of these are things that should stop it from going
> into GNOME now. Improvements can and should happen, but modules don't have
> to be perfect to get into GNOME - they need to be not awful and there need
> to be no obstacles to them becoming perfect. I think adding them to GNOME
> will make people such as yourself perfect them.

My comment mostly is that the current set of features isn't what we
(well, what I think we) want. If we want a banana, we shouldn't take an
orange and then try to change it ;-) Certainely we don't/shouldn't
require perfection, because nothing has that, but we do want to make
sure that when we accept something its fitting into our goal for
accepting it. I'm a little concerned that gst isn't targeted (or at
least well targeted) toward meeting the nebulous "manage your
system/hardware" goal that would be the primary reason for its
inclusion.

Also worrying me is that I don't see large changes to gst since the past
year or so, at least in this direction, so I wonder if I or other
usability people thinking gst should have a Bar config tool and a Baz
config tool, and should drop the Boot and totally change the Runlevel
config would have any impact on the actual implementation in a timely
manner (say... for 2.6). Basically, I think gst is only about 25%
"feature complete", and the features it does have are more than half not
terribly important features or have usability problems so serious that
most people will not find them useful (runlevels).

-Seth