Re: control-center - some input for Common Plan

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 12:29 +0100, John Rice wrote:
> Cool,
> 
> I've been thinking about this after the summit and scratching heads with 
> Darren Kenny and Calum Benson about the Control Center [my own head I 
> hasten to add, not Darren's or Calum's ;) ].
> 
> Few thoughts to put into the pot when you are considering your common 
> plan on this:
> 
> 1. Categorization: Preferences revisited has already done some work on 
> trying to consolidate and categorize things more sensibly than they have 
> been: http://live.gnome.org/PreferencesRevisited
> 
> We took at look at these suggestions, looked at Max OSX, MS Vista, NLD 
> and Fedora Core [menu layout equiv] and have just rolled a spreadsheet 
> that try's to capture what I think is a reasonable first stab at a 
> sensible categorization [attached in Calc format]. Will post it up to 
> http://live.gnome.org/PreferencesRevisited as well.

I've looked a little bit at this, but not had time to do a full review
and post my thoughts. I'll try to get to doing that soon though.

> 2. Control Center Applet UI: Would be great once we have broad agreement 
> on Categories to come up with a consistent UI to present this info to 
> the user. So going to set one thing doesn't look dramatically different 
> to any other Control Center applet. Should be possible for property 
> based stuff as least, going into Screen layout stuff gets a lot more 
> challenging, but little steps ...

Presenting some pieces of data is going to be vastly different than
presenting other pieces of data. For example, I imagine that
presentation of settings for hardware is going to be quite different
than presentation of choice for appearance related settings. This will
largely be solved by the consolidation of capplets itself, rather than
trying to come up with some new API that enforces some amount of
consistent UI.

> 3. Front End: my understanding of the current control center applets are 
> that they have a front end and back end architecture communicating via 
> XML. Would be great if we could support Python based front ends as well.

This is not at all how the control center works. This may be how the
system-tools stuff works though.

> 4. Extensible: idea of having Python is to make this really easy for 
> others to add their own Control Center applets to extend the 
> functionality as they see fit for their various distros and platforms. 
> If you need to write a back end that's OS specific then off you go as 
> they say.

There's nothing stopping them from doing this now. In fact, all of Red
Hat's system config tools are written in Python, afaik. The only current
requirements for appearing in the control center, is to have the proper
stuff in the .desktop files.

Thanks,

-- dobey