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

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2011-05-12 at 16:50 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Colin Walters wrote:
> > On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 3:27 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:
> >> If we hard-code what GNOME supports into the design, when the needs
> >> evolve then we need a centralised decision for each new need. Better to
> >> provide a way for applications to integrate with system settings,
> > 
> > These aren't applications, and no - we don't want to encourage apps to
> > drop things in system settings.
> 
> There is a world of distance between "disallow", "allow, but discourage"
> and "encourage".
> 
> I definitely think that there's value in having a firm hand over
> preferences, and (say) defining all of the top level preference
> categories - I also think there's value in allowing applications to add
> preferences inside a given panel, and providing firm guidelines for when
> that's appropriate and how to do it well.
> 
> > As far as helping out extension authors - yes, I think that has value,
> > but it's not as important as moving GNOME away from the "bucket of
> > parts" model is.
> 
> For something like this, I have a feeling we may only get one chance. If
> you don't allow any differentiation on top of GNOME, there is at least
> one distribution that will just do preferences differently & ignore
> control-center. And I can imagine that future environments along the
> lines of moblin, MeeGo, Maemo, etc will end up redoing the preferences
> from scratch, rather than building on the gnomecc work.

No, they would probably end up making the headers available, and build
on that. I don't see the problem here, if they actually intend on
replacing most of the work, they'll probably be patching out some of the
panels, and modifying some others.