Re: Removal of wireless-applets from gnome-applets?

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 18:01 -0500, Pat Suwalski wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> As of recent releases of gnome-applets, the wireless applet has been 
> removed.
> 
> I very much used and liked the wireless-applet and I'm curious if 
> there's some sort of module removal policy with these things. For 
> example, does an applet need to cover all the functionality of an old 
> applet before getting removed? If there were an applet that behaved 
> pretty much the same way as the old one, I would be inclined to switch 
> to it.
> 
> However, the immediate replacement, netstatus, does not do everything as 
> well as the w-a. For example, it does not seem to be able to show my 
> signal strength as a percentage, does not tell me how strong my signal 
> is via a colour cue, and has very annoying (distracting) flashing 
> monitors consuming valuable applet space. It seems to take away 
> everything that made wireless-applet better than all the others.

Was it really better?

> The main reason I was given for this change is that wireless-applet's 
> code is messy. To me, the copy in CVS looks short and simple. I also 
> cannot imagine it being a big deal to maintain.

Hmm, no. I don't know who gave you that reason but it's not. The main
reason is that most people with wireless don't need the percentage all
the time, or the display that everything works fine all the time.

Fedora removed the wireless applet to use Mark's gnome-netstatus, and I
thought it would be good to do the same for upstream. As for the
percentage display, it appears in the properties.

As I ported the wireless-applet, I was "maintaining" it (meaning a bug
fix here and there) with the gnome-applets maintainers doing the real
work on it.

> So, is there any reason why it should be removed before a proper 
> replacement is available? I cannot see netstatus gaining all this 
> missing functionality within the timeframe of the next release. I would 
> love to see w-a in Gnome 2.10.

Feel free to revive the wireless applet as a third party applet.

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>