Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 30Oct2001 06:02PM (-0500), Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> 
> Which isn't to say we shouldn't add XST, I'm undecided on that right
> this minute. (It's probably a 2.2 question anyhow.) But it is to say
> that we shouldn't think of GNOME as an operating system, because it
> isn't. It's one project that makes up the set of free software
> projects that typically make up an OS.
> 

It's definitely too late to add XST for 2.0.

Overall, I think GNOME should not shy away from providing a user
interface to system configuration. System setup and system utilities
are generally considered part of the desktop. 

The two difficulties here are: (1) it's hard to write tools of this
sort that are truly portable to the wide variety of underlying systems
out there, and (2) vendors may want to do something different because
they consider this kind of thing a point of differentiation. I don't
think either of these are very good reasons to avoid solving the
problem.

Naturally, though, it would be best to provide a solution that most
vendors are eager to adopt. So I think it's useful to determine their
requirements before adopting a GNOME-official solution. 

It seems to me that the ability to plug in back ends specialized to
the O/S, the ability to add support for OS-specific features as a
point of differentation, and the ability to add branding might be a
few of the important issues. 

Further, we need to work with the systems out there instead of
counting too much on GNOME-specific technologies, and we need to
consider how whatever tools and utilities we provide will interoperate
with non-GNOME graphical tools, command-line tools, or simple editing
of config files.

It would be nice to see a discussion of all these issues, but perhaps
we should focus on getting GNOME 2.0 out first.

Regards,

Maciej