Firewall configuration [was Re: no external panels for gnome-control-center]

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2011-05-12 at 18:14 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> Why? Because the premise of System Settings in GNOME 3 is,
> surprisingly, to change your system settings or personalize the
> experience. E.g. we think it genuinely makes sense to e.g. add a
> printer, change your desktop background, create an user account and so
> on. We should strive to make this as easy as possible and having 20
> panels such as "Java Settings" or "HTTPD Control" or even "Firewall"
> is something that gets in the way.

I'm hesitant to jump in the middle of this. I don't want to have
an argument, but I do think our designers should at least look
at the case of firewalls.

Configuring Apache is entirely orthogonal to your desktop, but
firewall configuration generally is not. We have quite a few
places in the user help where we say "Depending on how GNOME
was installed, you might have to change your firewall settings
for this to work." And we have to say that because some distros
block certain ports by default, and that actually affects the
sorts of things we talk about in the user help.

Unfortunately, we can't give real directions on what to do,
so we have a page that has some hand-wavy instructions that
are probably sufficient for some people.

So I guess my rule of thumb is, if it's something we find we
need to mention in the desktop help, it's something we ought
to look at dealing with in the desktop.

--
Shaun