Re: Proposal for inclusion in Desktop: pessulus

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 12:07 -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:
> On 10/28/05, Pat Suwalski <pat suwalski net> wrote:
> > So the only difference would be suggested grouping to indicate to
> > distros how to categorize their packages and/or create a gnome-admin
> > metapackage?
> 
> There may be different rules associated with the different sets, but
> it is possible that it merely serves as a grouping.  Also worth note
> is that there has been talk about trying to "franchise the release
> process" (on r-t? d-d-l?  I don't remember anymore...) in order to try
> to make our releases feel more inclusive.  (As people have pointed out
> before, "Why aren't Inkspace, GIMP, AbiWord, etc. part of the
> "official" "Gnome releases"?!?)

Such a grouping would, I think, give an indication of modularity.
If you throw a bunch of tools in an "Administrator Tools" release,
I think most people would expect that that whole set is something
extra that can sit on top of the core desktop.  Which is to say,
stuff in the core desktop couldn't have a dependency on stuff in
the admin release.

And maybe that's all right.  But if that were the case, we'd have
to be careful about what we shunt off to the admin release.  We
certainly wouldn't want to throw all the currently-requires-root
system config tools over there.  Instead, it would only contain
those things that are truly only useful to admins of large-scale
deployments.

We also need to be careful about how well we can modularize our
desktop documentation, without fragmenting into small documents
whose granularity makes no sense to users.  Of course, pluggable
help, as outlined in my Project Mallard write-up�, would help
considerably in that regard.

� http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/quack/mallard.xml

--
Shaun