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

[David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com>]

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Sergey Udaltsov
<sergey udaltsov gmail com> wrote:
>> Extension- and plug-in systems is often the symptom of a disease.
> How would you distinguish...?

I don't know. It's typically a highly subjective thing. Mostly it
comes down to what most people refer to as "good taste" vs "bad
taste". I don't know.

>> [1] : Except of course if some downstreams do development in their own
>> fucking sandbox.. no, this is not a cheap jab at Canonical.. it
>> includes e.g. Red Hat too. Or SUSE.
> Thank you, that is very interesting and insightful info. The question
> is - could (or would) GNOME do something to avoid that situation with
> distros?

Not showing 3rd party panels is one path forward. And I think it's the
right one. If all distros just patch in their own panels, maybe we
need to use a bigger stick to make them work upstream.

> g-c-c could be for linux what "system preferences" are for macos or
> "control panel" for windows - configuring every aspect of OS except
> configs of desktop apps (but including system configs, server apps
> config etc).

But that way you end up with useless things like a "Java Control
Panel" or "httpd Control Panel" [1] and other non-sense that you see
on Windows (and OS X for that matter - it's just that people don't
install much 3rd party crap there).

[1] : for example, system-config-httpd in Fedora is nothing more than
an fancy editor for /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf - it's a completely
inappropriate app because if you know what httpd is, you really don't
want to click GUI buttons - you want to edit the config file with
vi(1) or whatever your editor of choice is. Same goes for a lot of
other distro-specific config tools created "because we need a GUI"
without really thinking whether it was a good idea. </rant>

> Well, if gnome does not want it, let it be so. I am just
> kindly asking to put together some kind of policy document about all
> those things. Is that a reasonable and constructive request?

Not sure we need to be all lawyerish about it and write policy
documents and whatnot - I'd rather people spend time on writing
awesome code and doing awesome designs. All in the same sandbox :-)

And, FWIW, I'm just expressing my personal opinion about GNOME and
nothing I'm saying here is authoritative. It could be that the
gnome-control-center maintainers and others have other views about it.

    David