Re: PROPOSAL: GNOME Volume Manager for GNOME 2.8

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 22:52, Pat Suwalski wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > One more control panel - ugh. They are like weeds! Worse, apparently
> > being driven by tarball organization of the release, not by top down
> > design :-/ cf. "Preferences, System Tools" thread. Not a problem of your
> > making, but...
> 
> Havoc, I would suggest that this is one of the best control panels out 
> there. It is very functional, and its content is in no way touched by 
> any other control panel. It's not like "Keyboard" and "Keyboard 
> Shortcuts" and "Accessibility->Keyboard". This one actually stands on 
> its own, IMO.
> 

What I'd say is that item-by-item isn't the way to work out this problem
- the way to do it is to start with the whole list (as in "Preferences,
System Tools" thread) and then work from that into a series of UI
elements, some of them control panels, some of them dialogs or controls
that appear as part of various apps or desktop components or in response
to particular events.

When designing it as a whole in that way, you can make it all a lot more
sensible, and you're also confronted with the need to prioritize to keep
the control panel count (and individual panel size) sane. i.e. there's
finite space even if you can think of infinite things that are all
useful in isolation, in part the question is which are most useful
relatively.

This is what we have to do to keep GNOME sane and top-down-designed. It
seems to be somewhat out of sync with the results that are de facto
created by our organizational structure and development mode, however. I
think it'd be great if someone had some smart ideas on how to improve
the situation.

Havoc