Re: Module semi-proposal: gnome-shell

[Seif Lotfy <seif lotfy com>]

2009/11/3 Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>

On Mon, 2009-11-02 at 16:28 -0600, Brian Cameron wrote:
> Owen:
>
> It sounds like GNOME Shell will likely not integrate with GNOME 2.30.
>
> How are users expected to turn on/enable GNOME Shell?  At the Boston
> Summit, I remember people suggesting that there should be a checkbox in
> the Preferences->Appearance capplet that the user can check it to start
> using GNOME Shell.  Is this the plan?
>
> Whatever such interfaces are needed in the base desktop to provide end
> users with the ability to "switch" to GNOME Shell, I hope these
> interfaces make it into GNOME 2.30.  Ideally, users should just need to
> install the new GNOME Shell, mutter, etc. modules and have their desktop
> "just work".  Users should be able to enable GNOME Shell without needing
> to hack around with gconf-editor, .desktop files, etc.
>
> I think it will cause problems for adoption and testing if users need to
> reinstall patched versions of gnome-control-center (or whatever) in
> order to turn on GNOME Shell after installing the GNOME Shell packages.

Hey Brian -

Having a standard way to easily switch back and forth is a good idea,
thanks for bringing up the topic. For Fedora we've extended our "Desktop
Effects" capplet to allow changing to GNOME Shell as well as Compiz.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2009-August/msg00119.html

has a screenshot. It handles like checking for hardware 3D, letting the
user confirm that they still have a working session, and adjusting the
GConf settings for gnome-session to enable the appropriate window
manager and/or panel.

The basic operation of this program is not at all Fedora specific but
there are a couple of things that are tied to the way we do things:

 - We use the 'compiz-gtk' script to launch Compiz
 - We configure Compiz to use the GConf backend and allow setting
  a couple of settings that way.

We could try to make it more flexible to handle the way Compiz works on
other distributions, or even now if /usr/bin/compiz-gtk isn't there (and
it won't be there on any other distribution) then the Compiz option will
simply not be there, but maybe we should strip out the Compiz option
entirely and make it a "GNOME 3 Preview" tool, which would basically
have some explanatory text, a link to read more about GNOME 3, and the
ability to enable or disable.

This could just be shipped right in the gnome-shell module, so it would
be installed if gnome-shell was and not otherwise.

I don't think integrating this into the Appearance capplet really makes
sense - already we have very different things there:

 - Themes (advanced customization)
 - The size of your font (see what you are doing)
 - Change wallpaper (show off a picture of your kid)

Adding another option in there that complete changes the entire way your
desktop works adds a whole extra and much more radical level to this.

I'd be interested in hearing the opinions of different people who are
packaging up gnome-shell on what would be useful for them. The hard part
of the code is written, it's just a question of the details of the UI
and where we put it.

> In terms of zeitgeist, there have not been any tarball releases as far
> as I can tell.  If we are seriously considering adding zeitgeist into
> GNOME, I would think we should be starting to do more formal releases of
> the code.  I would think the sooner the better.

There were a couple of releases this summer:

http://bloc.eurion.net/archives/2009/here-is-zeitgeist-0-2-1/

which Siegfried stepped up to do so there would be a stable base for
GNOME Shell integration while the code was being rewritten in the 0.3
branch. (Apparently another rewrite is planned for the Zeitgeist
hackfest.)

 Correction the 0.3 is the rewrite planned to be done during the hackfest (we r not rewriting all just around 50%). We will release it as a 0.9 though since it will be our last iteration before we actually meet all the services we intended. So a 1.0 is sooner than u think

 

- Owen

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