Re: xscreensaver capplet.

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Jamie Zawinski <jwz jwz org> writes:
> Chema Celorio wrote:
> > 
> > I think we want a different program. There are going to be a lot of
> > things that we don't agree on, I can't expect you to agree on every
> > detail on how we believe that this should be done and v.s. I really
> > don't want to spend long threads discussing technical details trying
> > to reach an agreement. I don't have the energy nor the time to do so.
> > The reason is simple, it is going to be hard for us to agree on
> > everything [...]
> 
> This is what we call "compromise".  It takes time and effort, but
> the end result is a good one: one program instead of two, and lack
> of duplication of effort.
> 
> Forks are bad, mmmkay?
> 
> I am willing to compromise in many areas to reach this goal.
> 
> So far, your idea of compromise seems to be, "we'll just go work
> on our fork in our own way and ignore yours entirely."
> 
> If that's going to be your attitude, then I must ask that you not
> ship my program, xscreensaver, with GNOME.
> 
> Because I've done the fork thing before, and it sucks, and I'm not 
> doing it again.
> 

To be fair, I think the GNOME screensaver properties probably predates
the GTK-based xscreensaver tool, so I'm not sure it's a "fork," merely
a "duplication of effort." ;-)

On the other hand, Chema I think coordination with Jamie is necessary
if we are going to use xscreensaver. The KDE route of "make our own
copy of xscreensaver" resulted in a crappy screensaver collection and
unmaintained xscreensaver. And the current situation with Jamie's
xscreensaver leads to the capplet breaking all the time.

With the new capplet setup we don't even need to link to libcapplet,
right? We just launch capplets as their own window as a dialog. The
only reason the screensaver capplet even needs to use gnome-libs is
the Ximian archiver stuff. (Stock icons can be easily cut-and-pasted,
and in GTK 2 will be in GTK.)

With named sessions used for location management, we don't need to use
bonobo-config for that, so the only remaining reason we need to use 
the gnome libs at all is to get the "rollback" feature. I'm not sure
rollback is remotely useful for a screensaver capplet though. (Oh no!
I lost my sproingies! revert!)

Anyhow, allowing capplets to be simple standalone apps makes it a lot
easier to just ship the screensaver panel with xscreensaver.
And I think the effort to make that possible will pay off, because
we need to be able to ship capplets outside of the control-center
module anyhow.

Havoc