RE: [Nautilus-list] Re: GNOME user environment brainstorming

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

Hi,

I reckon I need to answer to that. I made a post on gnome-devel about a
month ago talking about that, but talking about NeXTStep.

http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/2001-April/msg00232.html
if you want to read it.

On 07 Jun 2001 12:52:05 -0700, Lion Kimbro wrote:
> 
> <QUOTE>
> Another nice feature was the installation of programs. You
> dragged a directory from one place and droppped it somewhere
> else! If the dir contains a script with a certain name then that
> script is run to start the program within when the dir is double-
> clicked from the filer (rather than simply opening the dir). If
> there was a particular image file within the dir then that became
> the applications icon (in place of the default dir icon). This
> kind of thing may be harder to implement with unix-like systems
> where an applications files are spread across the system (and
> package management had to be invented to deal with it...)
> </QUOTE>
> 
>   How does RISC OS take care of registrations?
> 
>   These ideas are simple and intuitive, but that doesn't necessarily make
> them good.
>   "Simple as possible, but no simpler".
> 
>   Consider this:
> 
>   You have a software bus. When an application receives mail, it wants to
> tell all the other applications that an email has just arrived. An
> application that is dormant needs to be loaded into memory so that it can
> hear the announcement, since it has registered interest in this type of
> event. This requires that the bus software knows about the existance of the
> application and how to awaken it. Application registration provides this
> notification.
> 
>   Program registration processes are good because they allow the OS (and by
> extension, other programs) to see each other automatically and interact with
> one another. It's good because it allows for standard indexing and rapid
> search.
> 
>   Sure, there's the downside that you can't just run around deleting files.
>   But I don't hear many complaints that I can't just run into /etc/ and
> start deleting files at random.
>   (I have a naive student who did this, trying to uproot sendmail from his
> system.)
> 
>   I suppose I could just not say anything confrontational, but I'm really
> surprised by the # of posts here saying, "Wow! That's an awesome idea! (How
> original!)" It's like reading about the amazing ".tgz" packaging system. I
> figure someone should voice a dissenting opinion.

Short answer (it's late already) is search paths: "you want to use
services, you'll need to put the application in one of these
directories, if you don't, you're still gonna be able to use the app,
but not to its full capabilities".

Having applications in one directory makes it much easier to move them
around, and the Gnome interface would then be application driven. How
many of you browsed your bin/ directories and double-clicked on an
application, ever ?

In the end, 1) it is possible (NeXTStep, GNUStep, OpenStep and MacOS X
are pretty good examples), and 2) it's not a lot of work to implement
the support functions and utilities for it.
It's much harder to actually get people to do it.

Cheers

-- 
/Bastien Nocera whose mail seems to go to oblivion
http://hadess.net