Re: Boxes (was Re: 3.4 Features, final round)

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hey Vincent,

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 3:00 AM, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> Le dimanche 06 novembre 2011, à 17:06 +0100, Frederic Peters a écrit :
>> + Boxes
>>   https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointThree/Features/Boxes
>>   → many commits, mclasen will push the developers to blog a progress report
>>     once they have something to show
>
> While Boxes look interesting, to me, it feels like it's "just" an
> application, and not a feature per se. And I'm not saying that in a
> negative way :-)

Whether Boxes should be part of the feature process is a good
question. To be honest, I'm not sure I totally understand the feature
process as it stands. I think it is good that we have some reigns on
the things that we consider part of the core though and I expect the
process will be refined as we go ahead.

Boxes is indeed an app. However, it is not just any app. It is one of
the special apps that we consider part of the core experience. These
are different from third party apps in a number of important ways. Not
limited to being: designed by the GNOME design team, designed to work
cooperatively with the other core apps, behaviorally and visually
consistent with other core apps, generically named, exclusive to the
GNOME core (not having an external identity or appearing in any app
store or other OS), totally amazing.

They are all listed here:
https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/

These are by no means the only apps that we'll see appearing for GNOME
3 but they are a special class. We want to take great care in how they
are designed and built. They are part of the core GNOME experience.

For many of those apps the utility is fairly self evident. I don't
suppose we need to make the case very strongly for Calendar being an
important core functionality. However, I do agree that Boxes may be a
bit more on the edge. There are a few things to keep in mind though.

First is that Boxes isn't just about virtualization. It is useful to
anyone that has ever needed to use a computer that isn't in front of
them physically. That includes virtualized machines both local and
remote as well as remote systems in general. If you are on your laptop
at home and forgot something on your machine at work - theoretically
Boxes can help you out.

Another thing to consider is that Boxes being built-in helps people
test out new releases of our own systems. If you want to try out or
review the latest release of GNOME 3 you don't need to install
additional tools to do so. Just click on the link in the release
announcement and without much delay you have a Box with ready to try.
(sidebar: Windows 8 includes a remote desktop "core app" by default it
seems.)

I think there is a lot of value in embracing virtualization and remote
computing and building it into the core of GNOME in a way that doesn't
make the user think about virtualization or remote computing :)

> So unless I'm missing something, I wouldn't track that as a 3.4 feature.
> We can of course talk about the app when promoting 3.4, though.

To be honest, if you leave out core apps from this process I'm not
sure what is left is all that interesting. Core apps are the
"interesting" parts of the OS.

Jon