Re: Some general facts about panel and gnome

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel gnu org>]

>  Fact 1: There should a recent accessed-modified document sub-menu. 
> This is implemented in Windows and is a good idea! This sub-menu is of 
> course a gnome_private thing. It should of course be created by gmc or 
> its descendant with mime-types and all!

Agreed.  This very feature was part of the ideas we originally had
back when GNOME was started.  

Some of this was implemented as part of the gnome recently-used
mechanism.  But lack of integration and lack of use of these framewrok
(and agreed, it is not the best one) made this feature less valuable
than we had intended to.

Doing this is not completely hard;  It would requiere a few things:

      1. Go trough all the GNOME applications that deal with documents
         and add a call to the gnome_history_recently_used function.

      2. Add support to the panel to display the information recorded.

      3. Optionally: enhance the applications by mimicking the GNOME
         GhostView code to show a list of the recently used files by a
         given application.  This one needs a bit more of code, and we
         should try to provide a library call to do all this work (but
         it would only be available for gnome-libs-2 applications).

>  Fact 3: There should be a device manager for God's sake! Either we do 
> it, or I will go beg kernel developers to make one (as they did with 
> make xconfig), however it will probably be Tcl/Tk and not Gnome! I 
> already suggested that but no one even discussed it!

What exactly is a device manager?  And what would the role of this
device manager be?

Is this something that would enable users to access cdroms and
floppys correctly?

>  Fact 4: Either tell enlightenment (best window manager in my opinion) 
> folks to be compliant or fork if you wanna keep it as default gnome 
> window manager! Someone with good window manager knowledge should do 
> it! I have yet to see another decent window manager for gnome that is 
> at least not completely ugly! We NEED a default 100% compatible window 
> manager by default. Other are welcome to comply if they wish!

Most users these days think that sawmill is the best GNOME window
manager out there; Many people think Sawmill has a very good code
base, uses little memory, it is very efficient and has exceptional
extensibility trough its build-in scripting language (all of Sawmill's
features are implemented as scripts, even GNOME compliancy is done by
a script)

>   Fact 5: I don't know if this redhat's problem or gnome's. It's the 
> file manager! I know you guys are re-writing it from scratch. Anyway, 
> avoid the following problem: I keep setting my zip drive icon in the 
> gmc icon link on my desktop along with other 'disk' icons. Except that 
> cdrom is not there. That's ok with me, but each time I mount a CDROM, 
> all devices are re-scanned and all their icons are reset to default. 
> THIS IS BAD!

Ok, this is indeed a bug.  Could you please fill a bug report so that
it can be processed?  Check http://bugs.gnome.org, or use the
"gnome-bug" script or the "bug-buddy" system to submit a bug report. 

>  Fact 7: We need to talk to several software vendors to make their 
> stuff support gnome one way or the other! Example: staroffice can plug 
> itself in KDE and CDE. They should do the same with gnome. 

Yes, agreed.  Are you interested in pursuing this task?  I would be
very glad if you took an active role in the GNOME world by doing this
kind of tasks and pointing out these problems to companies like star
office. 

Best wishes,         
Miguel.