Re: some more questions on the control center shell, etc

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Fri, 2007-03-02 at 15:13 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> With the big picture so vague, debating the details of the menus or 
> control panel is just a waste of time (made even more sad by the fact 
> that these details have been debated, and changed back and forth in a 
> kind of brownian motion, for shockingly close to a decade).

Indeed.  We've seen this beast before.  On the other hand what we have
is clearly not scalable (one level menu item from system->preferences).
We have made several attempts in marketing-list to define what GNOME is
and I must admit I can't remember the outcome.

The natural progression seems to be that we are a reference platform for
others to change into whatever they wish.  A repository of both
documentation, code, and ideas so that everyone can put their own spin
into it.  We provide a neutral playground for 3rd party coders to add
features/fix bugs that will be added to distro desktops.

We badly need to debate this, unfortunately this mailing list is a
really bad forum because we  historically, never been able to make big
decisions in mailing list for whatever reason.  If you want to change
the status quo, I think we'll have to have an all hands meeting at
GUADEC and have an orderly session on what the GNOME platform is and
where it is going.  Perhaps we are again at a pivotal point like GNOME
1.x -> GNOME 2.x.  It would be helpful to know how we made that
decision.  We will need mature statesmen who can articulate clearly for
our platform.

sri


-- 
Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>