Re: control center plans, etc.

[Benjamin Kahn <xkahn ximian com>]

On 19 Jun 2001, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Also, I think we need to rationalize which control panels exist -
> e.g. a Colors & Fonts that contains both theme and WM settings,
> instead of "Theme Selector" plus obscure sawfish panel.
> 
> I'd appreciate thoughts on currently-planned work in this area, 
> etc.

	I am not sure what people are planning for the control center in
general.  I know that Bradford has been working on it.  However, Bradford
and I have been talking a little bit about some of the capplets.  You
mention them in your vision email:

> - Default Editor capplet should just die; redundant with text/plain
>   MIME type handler
>
> - URL handlers - should die, replaced by File Types

	And I would add to that list the Default Applications capplet I
wrote for Ximian Gnome 1.4.  Here are some comments:

	There are three problems here that these capplets are trying to
address.  They may all be the same problem, pretending to be many, but we
currently have several capplets to handle them.

	The first problem is file type handling.  What action should be
taken based on file types?  The second problem is what should be done with
a certain access method. (url)  These two are sometimes combined.  For
example, http://www.some.url.com/~myname/mydocument.abiword should find a
program which knows how to deal with http and view the file in abiword.

	And the third problem is selection programs for system
functions.  What terminal should applications open to run terminal based
applications?  Which help program should be used?  What file
manager?  It seems to me that this is seperate from mime types and urls. 

	I have no solutions at the moment, but last I heard, Bradford felt
that all three functions should be merged into File Types.
	
						-Ben