Re: GlobalMenu Application for inclusion as a GNOME module

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 9:50 AM, Sandy
Armstrong<sanfordarmstrong gmail com> wrote:
>
> I'm not going to debate this decision (which I disagree with) here,
> but does that mean that in the opinion of gnome-shell developers,
> GlobalMenu will not be a useful or necessary addition to gnome-shell?

Well first let me state my unhappiness with the current model of
proposing things as additions to GNOME, which is that the proposals
are too far tilted towards "we want to modify the source dependency
graph in this way", but what they should really be about is "here's
our proposed changes to the user experience, and we would like to
implement it like this".

What does adding global menu to 2.30 *mean*?  Is it just another thing
in the list of applets?  Or is it being proposed to be on by default?
Those are *radically* different things.

I see global menu a lot like a nontrivial Firefox extension; something
that changes the UX in a fairly major way and ties deeply into the
guts of the stack.  Which gets me back to how I think GNOME should
work.  We should be providing a stable, well designed core.  And we
should have a system for finding extensions.   In other words,
something like: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox

Now of course software installation in the free software community has
long been held in the kung-fu death grip of those people who think it
makes sense to have the OS kernel, developer tools, and user
applications all mixed into one big list of undifferentiated stuff and
presented/managed exactly the same.  It's a thorny problem, don't get
me wrong, but if say there were a way to tag system packages as
"gnome-core-extension", and have a PackageKit dialog which can filter
by tags or the like, and some popularity metric, I think that'd be a
great way to present things like global menu.

Though much higher priority is some PackageKit way to present just
things which have a .desktop file.