Re: Control-center redux

[Bradford Hovinen <hovinen ximian com>]

On Tue, 2001-12-04 at 13:08, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> 
> There's been some debate as to what the next control-center should look
> like, and how to get them ported as soon as possible.  I'd like to try
> to open it up again in the hopes that we can get a solution soon.
> 
> The current plan is to ditch the current embedding app, and make all
> 'capplets' simple dialogs.  These would be launched from either the
> panel menu, nautilus, or the simple shell.  Currently, all capplets link
> to libcapplet.  We can either port them away from libcapplet, or modify
> libcapplet as needed.  There are a couple reasons we might want to keep
> libcapplet:
> 
>  * One-time support:  We can add this to the capplets easily.  Of
>    course, with GConf being used, the problem of multiple instances of a
>    config dialog goes down.
> 
>  * Enforcing of style guide:  I don't know how important this is, as
>    social pressure and control of the code does a pretty good job of
>    keeping things consistent.  Still, it might be useful to cut down on
>    the number of bizarro third-party capplets.
> 
>  * Flexibility in the future:  If we decide that embedding wasn't such a
>    bad idea after all, we have the flexibility to go back and add it
>    without too much trouble.

I generally oppose retaining libcapplet. I don't believe the first two
items here are terribly important, and, should the planets realign in
such a manner that we wish to restore embedding, it would be far better
to convert the capplets to Bonobo controls than to use an additional
library. Libcapplet is not compatible with the idea of converting to
Bonobo controls.

> Additionally, we need to decide what the basic capplet should look like.
> We've been wanting to move to instant-apply for a while, but it's clear
> there are cases where it's not going to work as well (such as the theme
> changer, or eve the background selector) as the action is too slow.
> Additionally, I'm pretty sure changing the mouse's acceleration while
> trying to drag the slider is bad UI. (-:

I tried moving to instant apply a while back and decided it wasn't a
very good idea, primarily for the reasons listed here.

> Whatever we decide, it'd be good to decide soon, as we have a lot of
> capplets to port, and the sooner we can start, the better.

Indeed.

I have started porting things over, but the work is proceeding very
slowly. It should pick up in pace this week, provided I do not run into
unexpected difficulties.

> Thanks,
> -Jonathan
> 
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