Re: no external panels for gnome-control-center [was Re: GNOME Feature Proposal: Backup]

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2011-05-11 at 10:14 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-05-11 at 07:32 +0200, Michael Terry wrote:
> > So as the Deja Dup maintainer, life will go on when you drop support.
> > Worst case, I can just make the panel a dialog.
> > 
> > But dropping the existing API feels like a frustrating bait and
> > switch.  It was not clear (at least to me) that this was your
> > intentional all along, so myself and others made plans and put effort
> > into making panels.
> > 
> while I'm not sure making the API private is the best idea, I really
> understand the reasons behind that decision, which is to not allow for a
> control-center crowded with lots of crazy panels, specific to
> applications.
> 
> But backup is indeed something that makes a lot of sense as a System
> Settings panel, so I think it could probably be integrated into
> gnome-control-center itself. So, what are the dependencies the c-c panel
> in Deja Dup has?
> 
> So, getting some design for this would be a good thing, so that we can
> start integrating it into the control center itself.
> 
> Also, another solution might be to keep the g-c-c API public, but have a
> whitelist, so that we just list there the panels that we bless and that
> will be loaded in the g-c-c shell. Others would just be ignored, and so
> distributions can choose to add the panels they want to the whitelist.

If the whitelist is changeable (well, it always is, really), you lose.
You're just shifting the responsibility from the upstream maintainers to
the downstream maintainers. But it will still be upstream getting the
blame for the bad design, eg. GNOME will be blamed for the system
settings being a random collection of bits, when we're designing an OS.