Re: [Setup-tool-hackers] RE: 2.4: System Tools - Please try them

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

As I've said before, I think gst is great, and I'd really love to see it
in GNOME, especially with a more complete set of tools. As in the last
GUADEC, I want to push hard for their inclusion. There are just a lot of
usability concerns that are serious enough that I think they should be
addressed before inclusion. It might be possible to address them before
the UI freeze, in which case most of my objections would evaporate (save
for the incompleteness, but if Carlos thinks that will be solved in the
not terribly distant future, I guess that's fine).

> The GST (due to its infrastructure) is perfectly targeted to the "manage
> your system/hardware" goal, and IMHO gnome wants bananas and oranges ;-),
> it's true that there are some tools that could be needed by gnome too, and
> gst doesn't (still) provide them, but it's just a matter of time, they

My worry is that gst (/xst) has been around for a long time, and its
been quite a while since a new tool was added.

> >
> > 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).
> 
> Changing the runlevel tool to make in services oriented tool is mostly an
> UI Change (the backend could remain the same), and can be done quite
> easily, but I need a better design for it, since I think that the
> runlevels concept (abstracted or not, at least for sysv and file-rc) are
> neccesary for a tool like this, I'll try to contact the usability people
> for this.

Well, you're contacting me ;-)

It may be necessary for a small number of people (or, I would argue, not
necessary but they've gotten used to it and think its necessary, but
either way it helps them out), but most people don't need this at all.
Even within the people for whom this feature is desirable, I bet most of
them are sufficiently set in their ways that they'll continue using the
terminal to make changes like this.

But even after saying that... I don't object to the current ability to
show run-levels with "more options" (well, I think there are ways to do
that better, but its not bad), but the tool should not be characterized
in its title bar and in the menus by this advanced use. Right now, for
most people, its a tool for editing "Services" or something like that.

> anyways, what kind of desktop would offer a clock that allows changing to
> UTC, internet time, showing a calendar... and not changing the time? ;-)

Yes, I agree, though the need for specific tools is alleviated because
most distros ship their own anyway (and probably will continue to do so
until gst is extremely compelling).

-Seth