Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Arturo Espinosa Aldama <arturo ximian com>]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Jody Goldberg wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 11:53:18PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> >
> > 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".

The Ximian Setup Tools are aiming at this problem, in a modular way: every
subsystem that needs fonts is a module. Modules are X Window, gnome-print,
StarOffice, AbiWord, etc. Each module takes care of the hassle of
installing/uninstalling/listing the fonts in its subsystem. This way we
can have fonts that are in sync. We don't provide our own solution: we
just go and configure the others. Of course it is not as easy as I put it
here, but Joakim Ziegler has done some good research on this and we know
it can be done. Tambet Ingo is working on the Font XST tool.

> That is a laudable goal.  Is there any chance of this happening ?
> There appear to be alot of obstacles.  Frankly I'd prefer to see
> a potentially gnome specific solution if it could be done within our
> lifetimes.  A cardinal rule of development would seem to apply :

>     It is easier to ask contrition than permission
>
> Specify a decent mechanism and possibly it will be adopted
> by other projects.

Yeah. That's what all the other font support coders have wished for their
own project: we're coding the Yet Another Font Scheme, but ours is so good
that everybody will want to use it! It has clearly not hapenned.

A good example of a bad solution is kppp. kppp lets you configure your
modems and set up internet dial-up configurations, and then run the
connections. The problem? They don't configure the underlaying system;
they took the code from wvdial and stuck it in their sources, and then use
their own location (just like kfontinst) to store the configuration. If an
end-user decides to migrate to a new internet dialer, he has no easy
migration path.

With the Ximian Setup Tools, what we did was to add wvdial as a
requirement and configure it from a standard location. In the case of
RedHat, we can even import information from chat-based configurations and
automatically migrate them to wvdial (if possible). Any interface that you
configure with our tools is visible and fully compatible with RedHat's
tools. And that's our policy for all of the distros we support. I think
it's the way to go: no, GNOME is not an OS, but it should be able to deal
with configuration - at least, but not exclusively, for the end user.

In the case of Debian, an ipchains init.d script is missing, so we install
one at run-time. If the XST are uninstalled, the machine still works with
the given configuration.

Greetings,
Arturo