Re: GNOME Settings vs. Application Specific Settings

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

"Erick Woods" <erick gnomepro com> writes:

> I am helping Kyle Davis with Velocity, a file manager for GNOME.  We are
> running into things which are currently Nautilus specific and would be
> better if moved to a more neutral corner of gconf.  The the following define
> found in capplets/font/main.c is the current issue.  #define
> DESKTOP_FONT_KEY       "/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_font"
> 
> Can that be relocated to a better spot?  Perhaps:
> "/desktop/gnome/interface/desktop_font_name"  I don't know who is the best
> person to deal with this, but it really should be a GNOME key and not a
> Nautilus key.  I am also finding several areas where there are Nautilus
> specific calls - should a file manager agnostic way of doing things be
> worked out?  In the long run, it would be nice to not have control center
> dependant on Nautilus - in the near future we hope to find that Velocity
> meets all the needs of the users who choose it and having another file
> manager lying around doesn't make sense.

We can probably move these particular keys over for 2.6.  That being
said, I'm not that keen to go out of my way to allow alternate
file-managers.  The general trend in the future will be toward closer
integration, not toward genericism.  We will need to work closer with
nautilus in the future, especially with the mime rewrite.  

We tried to make it so that people could use alternate window-managers,
and found that to be a big waste of time.  It was very painful to get
this right and didn't even work well with the theme capplet.  No one
even tried to write a module for another window-manager, either.

Thanks,
-Jonathan