Re: Application/System Tools vs System/Administration

[Owen Williams <ywwg usa net>]

On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 14:04 -0700, Alex Graveley wrote:

> People who know or care what these capplets do are such a small, 
> hyper-advanced set of users that I think asking them to install a 
> separate package is not a large request.
> 
> -Alex

The problem is, if an advanced user installs a new system, they will
never be explicitly "asked" to install a separate package.  Those
features will simply not be there, and the user might assume that they
have been removed, much like it appeared to many users that nautilus
browse mode was removed.  Sometimes it's not clear that advanced
features still exist, but are hidden or require separate packages.

There's a lot of tension between features that are targetted at new
users and features that power users like.  For instance just because
some people don't like window shading and have UI-speak to back up their
argument doesn't mean other people who love that feature are wrong.  

Maybe gnome needs three sets of meta-packages:  gnome-conservative for
all the "safe for newbies" stuff, gnome-poweruser for things like window
shading and sloppy focus, and gnome-crack for UI experimentation
(libgnotify, etc).  Some distros have a choice between "desktop" and
"workstation," and that could divide conservative from poweruser, and
crack would have to be installed specifically.

That way if a poweruser asks "what happened to window preferences??"
someone can say "oh you just need gnome-poweruser," as opposed to
needing to install a specific package from fifth-toe.  I especially
don't like the way Windows XP does it, with separate install files for
UI tweaking, Multiple Desktops, and X-mouse.

(And I think a separate crack set is a good idea because there's so much
arguing about what features, that no one has even used, are good or not.
Too many ideas get shot down before they are ever implimented.)

owen williams