Re: GNOME Nirvana; How to reach it and what to do once we get there.

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp martianrock com>]

On Thu, 2003-06-12 at 20:33, Callum McKenzie wrote:
> Since I won't be able to argue this at GUADEC, I thought I'd just make
> a few small comments.
> 
> In general I agree with Iain's assessment. We have no real problems
> with what we produce, it's how we present it to the world.
> 
> There should certainly be recommended products, but it needs not just
> a quality rating (which is a good idea), but also an idea of where it
> fits into the infrastructure i.e. basic libraries, basic desktop,
> blah, blah, blah. We all know in theory how this works, but currently
> people are presented with isolated software map entries or a big ftp
> directory. A simple web page with categories: basic libraries,
> basic desktop, recommended apps, extra apps. With the current release
> filling the first three categories and fifth toe the last (or
> something like that). Perhaps also break up the release directories in
> a similar way so that people can just do a bulk download on the basic
> directories and pick and choose from the rest.
> 
> That is a really incomplete idea, but it should be simple to implement
> with immediate benefit.

I like everything I have heard so far.  I personaly feel the desktop
should provide enough functionality/guidelines that people programming
applications can be confident that no, or very little external
dependencies will exist.

I would like to take the above suggestion made by Callum and expand on
it to include what I call collections.  Collections would be a catagory
of applications that work well with each other.  For instance an
internet collection would contain a browser, e-mail, IM client and other
components that are know to work well with each other.  Another example
would be a programming collection which would include Glade, Anjuta and
DevHelp.  One would not have to install everything included in a
collection but they could be confident that components they did install
could interact on some level to create a complete set of tools for a
specific task instead of being islands unto themselves.  This would
hopefully encourage projects to work on interoperability.  It could
bring us back to our Unix philisophical roots of having small programs
that do one thing well while being able to interoperate with other
programs to create more complex functionality.

Just a suggestion that I would like to see implemented.  Other than that
I would like to thank the core Gnome team for their great leadership and
ability to listen to the users.   They don't get thanked enough.

--
J5