Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

> One bit of braindamage in thinking GNOME is an OS is that we start
> reinventing lots of wheels at the wrong place in the dependency chain,
> because we get the delusion that all apps that matter will use GNOME
> stuff. And that's just not true - it's hubris plain and simple.

I do not consider GNOME an OS, and I think that Seth has given a lucid
explanation on his concept of the OS which I pretty much agree with.

The time that the user has to go to a shell to run a command in a
terminal is the time that GNOME has not provided a solution.  Some tasks
are not worth spending the time on, because they have a very small
return on the time invested (for example, a kernel debugger interface
will be used by a few people) while a tool that configures the clock
makes a lot more sense.

So we should make sure that as a project we provide the tools that would
make Gnome a decent operating environment.  Whether a distribution wants
to use a particular tool or not is up to the distribution.

> At some point, a decent user experience simply requires a lot of
> OS-specific integration work. I don't think there's much way around
> it. And certain kinds of progress are going to require new OS
> features, such as file change notification, and removable media
> handling, and USB/hotplug device handling, and PCMCIA handling, and so
> on. Replacing the kernel with gnome-kernel or the PCMCIA scripts with
> GNOME-pcmcia is just not a solution.

That is indeed not an option, but nobody is talking about that.  Indeed
the XSTs (which is the thread we are discussing) are very good at
isolating themselves from the actual operating system, and they operate
on unmodified systems.

They also have been designed to edit existing files, and edit in place 
the proper files for each operating system.  That means that it is
possible to mix the use of XSTs by and end user and still allow a
sysadmin to use vi/emacs/bash to make changes himself. 

Miguel
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