Re: desktop effects tab in appearance capplet

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 19:00 +0200, Patrick Niklaus wrote:
> >
> >  I'm sorry, but I don't believe 90% of "average joe" users are interested
> >  in cool effects, unless you have some formal statistics to back this
> >  claim.
> >
> 
> Sorry, I think you misunderstood me there. What I meant is that, *if*
> Joe The Average User wants to have 'cool effects' he most likely
> doesn't want Metacity composition. What Joe sees is one of the rather
> eye-grabbing effects (cube, animation, expo, whatever...) and he wants
> to have them as well. So Joe looks into his appearance settings dialog
> and finds something called "Desktop Effects", sounds promising, right?
> So he enables it and what he gets is Metacity composition. That's not
> really what Joe wanted, is it?

Possibly not, but this is rather a pointless argument. If his friend has
managed to get the "eye-grabbing" effects enabled, Joe would surely just
go back and ask him how he did it.

> 
> >
> >  Not really. Compiz is not on the list of modules for GNOME, so we can't
> >  start adding support or dependencies for it. Otherwise we will have to
> >  support ever other window manager that anyone requests.
> >
> >  If you want to suggest that GNOME formally depends on Compiz, or depends
> >  on both Compiz and Metacity, please feel free to bring it up on
> >  desktop-devel-list.
> >
> 
> So what you are telling me here is that Gnome policy does not allow to
> add settings that enable/disable/start non-Gnome modules? I don't
> really see how Gnome depends on Compiz when you need to define a
> compile time flag to enable it - that is an option not a dependency.

Right, and that's why I suggested the configure flag in the first place!

But as Jens rightly pointed out, even if we added this code into
gnome-control-center, the distributions haven't actually all agreed on
what features they want to expose and how. Sadly, at the end of the day,
maybe it is better for the distros to all patch it the specific way they
want. What we can do though, is make sure extending the appearance
capplet is as easy as possible (which hopefully it is, since I also had
this in mind when I set out the code layout).

Regards,

Thomas