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

[Sergey Udaltsov <sergey udaltsov gmail com>]

> 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.
Fair enough.

> 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.
Well, their own panels might control things that are not related to
the desktop as such. I do not think anyone in gnome would welcome
those things upstream...

> 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).
Right, "httpd control panel" is basically one example of what redhat's
system-config-* tools are doing.

> 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>
Err... Personally I always thought that the area where IIS was way
ahead of httpd is the GUI configuration tools nicely integrated into
system configuration GUIs.

> 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 :-)
Well, it is not about law - it would just indicate that people should
not even bother using temporary public APIs that might occationally
(for some tactical reason) be provided. That would explain that the
only way to keep long-term health relations with GNOME as upstream is
do to THESE things and not to do THOSE things. Helpful strategy hints.

> 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.
Sure. But according to this thread, your opinion is very similar to
the ideas expressed by many others, including g-c-c drivers. Thank you
for explaining things.