Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell

[Patryk Zawadzki <patrys pld-linux org>]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 11:57 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
>> I think the community would love to see some more "why" behind the "how" :)
>>
>> For example I'd like to know why shell reinvents the graphical toolkit
>> and comes with a (hardcoded?) theme which in turn makes it look out of
>> place. Or why JS and not LUA or Python. I'm sure there was some
>> evaluation behind these decisions but I'm not even sure where to dig.
> how about starting from the wiki page of the project? there's a lot of
> information, rationales and links to discussions. but, ultimately: it's
> a choice from the maintainers and I expect people accept decisions from
> the maintainers of a project because - well, they are the ones doing the
> damned work.

To be clear, I did not write to ask anyone to change the
implementation. I only pointed to the kind of information I feel is
missing. I did start with the wiki page of the project but it links to
a lot of blog posts so I gave up before I reached the post Johannes
linked to.

>> It's details like this that make the project look more like OpenOffice
>> than a GNOME app ("here's the resulting code" versus "here are the
>> plans and the rationale, please discuss").
> what's fundamental is that not everything should be open to discussion.
>
> sure, if you disagree on the choice of colors in the CSS theme then you
> can discuss it with the UI design team - as long as you avoid
> bike-shedding them to death because that's not nice and all; but if you
> want to discuss the language of choice then you misunderstood how an
> open source project works. the gnome-shell developers decided, and you
> either follow them or you can start writing your own shell in your own
> language.

Fair enough but in the past GNOME used to share the common graphical
design. GNOME Shell is radically different here so it's not the "usual
case". I wondered not about the supposed one-upping the color choices
but about actually using the current theme instead. That's hardly what
one would call bike-shedding.

But then again, it's now too late to discuss any of the choices as the
code is already there. It would still be nice to have a single
information source that isn't just linking to other people's blogs. :)

-- 
Patryk Zawadzki