Re: GNOME Settings vs. Application Specific Settings

["Erick Woods" <erick gnomepro com>]

"Jonathan Blandford" <jrb redhat com> writes:
> "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.

I caught Dave Camp on irc.  He is open to the change provided Kyle and I do
the work, which is reasonable.

Like Dave says, Velocity offers different features that may never make it
into Nautilus and visa versa (paraphrasing).  That clearly demonstrates a
niche for alternatives.  In my opinion, GNOME as a platform shouldn't lock
users into using a single anything.  That doesn't mean that GNOME cannot
support Nautilus as the preferred file management solution for users and
distribute it as the default.  It simply means that GNOME should make it
easy for anyone to create an alternate file manager and expect to access
settings which should be maintained by the desktop, not the application.
Supporting one project as the default is one thing, doing it to the
exclusion of another project is dangerous.

Thanks,

Erick