Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com> writes:

> Havoc, wrote :
> > Part of the reason you see reinvention from the operating system is
> > the fact that GNOME occasionally insists on doing its own proprietary
> > solutions that don't fit in to the system as a whole, or that don't
> > fit in to a reasonable long-term vision of the open source UNIX
> > platform as a whole, or that haven't considered all the requirements
> > of an OS primarily targetted at servers and technical users. Just .02
> > for your consideration.
> 
> GNOME may not be the OS, and we should not want to be the OS.
> However, there will always be a boundary layer where we need to
> interact and some cases configure.  I'll pick an example near and
> dear to my bug list.
> 
>     Font installation.
> 
> This is a problem that is specific to
>     - OS
>     - Distributions
>     - Version numbers
>     - Probably a pile of other things that don't leap to mind
> 
> However, to my mind this is a critical element of the user
> experience.  Pango may have the slickest rendering system known to
> man.  Gnome-Print may generate anti-aliased previews that have them
> drooling in the aisles, but neither is terribly useful unless the
> font subsystem is properly tuned and configured.  This issue has
> many layers all of which need to be functional for applications to
> be functional.
>     - Display fonts
> 	: Availability
> 	: Fall backs for different encoding so that something is
> 	  displayed.
>     - Print fonts
> 	: How to map to display fonts
> 	: How to find out where they are installed.
>     - Common substitutions for unknown fonts.
> 	: 'MS Bizaaro Bold 9' should display/print the same way in
> 	  all gnome applications.
> 
> We don't have solutions to these for gnome-2.0.  However, IMHO
> the eventual solution would belong in the core gnome platform.

This is a _perfect_ example of why GNOME can't be the OS. GNOME
may have the best font system in the world, but unless the user
sees consistent font installation across:

 - KDE
 - Mozilla
 - StarOffice
 - "Native" GNOME apps

Then the user will think "my desktop/GNOME has broken fonts".

There is a somewhat different situation than some other OS-relation
situations in that it's not an integration issue for the person
packaging GNOME, it's an integration problem we have to deal with at
the GNOME project by coming up with a common solution with other
people writing for the free desktop.

Regards,
                                              Owen
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