Re: New idea (was: Re: Package managment idea...)

["Jason Nordwick" <nordwick xcf berkeley edu>]

>Session and shutdown are already taken care of in gnome-libs.  And
>package management is taken care of by the distribution.
>

That is the central point, basically.  You can't rely on the package tools
to take care of inserting/removing entries/associations/etc, because Gnome
is supposed to be platform independant.  I was trying to find a way to get
them entered outside of the package manager.  Of course, as you state, all
the information would be kept in some resource file, but initially querying
the application would be necessary to find out what to do.  I more I talk to
people, though, the better I think it would just be to add the ability to
the native packaging system, instead of trying to work around it in a
platform independant manner. If we only go for BSD and Linux support (I mean
all Free operating systems) then  we shouldn't have that much to code and
support.  On all the BSDs it would relatively easy since they share a common
package management system, on Linux you would have to do it for each
distribution.

>Personally, I think that GNOME would benefit if either there were window
>managers designed specifically with gnome, or if there were better
>integration tools for the current window managers (say to push the
>entries from the GNOME "start" menu to the root menus of common window
>managers.
>

I have always wanted this.  When I get back from vacation and get
Free/NetBSD specifics done, then I was thinking of hacking Scwm to do
something like this.

>The idea being that this would allow a replacement of the modules in
>order to make it look and feel however you want, without the need to go
>window manager hopping like people do now.
>

Look at Scwm.  Everything is implemented in loadable modules with a small
core.  All the modules are programmed in Guile (Scheme) and run-time
loadable.  I think that E also support loading like this, but compiled and
linked at execute time.

They should just combine Scwm and E.  That would be the ultimate in looks
and extensiblity.  I would die to see this happen.


-jay