Re: [Setup-tool-hackers] RE: 2.4: System Tools - Solaris

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 07:46, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > From: Calum Benson [mailto:calum benson sun com] 
> > On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 12:07, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > 
> > > Personally I think they are very useful and important, and 
> > really belong in
> > > the Desktop. But we probably need some support from the SUN 
> > folks. Is SUN
> > > even interested in them?
> > 
> > I don't know for sure, but I'd guess probably not... Sun has a
> > comprehensive set of web/Java-based Solaris system management tools
> > already. (Which, it has to be said, have spawned just about 
> > the biggest
> > set of UI guidelines I've ever seen).
> 
> Is that the webmin stuff? I used that once and it didn't look very
> guidelined to me.
> 
> So how happy are we, and Sun, to say "these modules are part of GNOME
> Desktop, but they don't actually work on Solaris, and they don't want them
> anyway.".

I don't think you're asking the right question, Murray. Portability has
to be like all of our other guidelines- it's not 'is it accessible' it's
'can it be made accessible if someone puts the work in.' 

So, if Sun has legitimate architectural critiques, then that's a
showstopper. If Sun just says 'we don't care and won't port it', that's
not. We can't limit ourselves to the set of features someone is willing
to port to Solaris, because, frankly, there aren't many Solaris-based
volunteers.

Sander[1] does not appear optimistic about the architecture[2], but I'd
love for someone else to take a look. Joe Marcus's preliminary work is
encouraging to me on this score.

Luis

[1]Who is never optimistic about anything ;)
[2]I don't think the design critiques are valid- it would be very nice
to have an utterly pluggable design as he's suggesting, but we have to
be realistic about the resources available. If someone were to write
what he's suggesting for gst2, of course, that would be great. :)