Re: Ungnomifying the control center

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 14:04 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 1:27 PM, Calum Benson <Calum Benson sun com> wrote:
> >
> > On 24 Oct 2008, at 10:53, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> >
> >> On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 11:50 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> >> <snip>
> >>>
> >>> It might make sense to stop shipping the shell, since we've never
> >>> really
> >>> used it in upstream GNOME -- don't know what people think, though.
> >>
> >> We could also disable it by default, and have whoever is interested in
> >> fixing its horrible design (eg. code not UI) ideas just do it.
> >
> > FWIW, we're actually looking into doing a complete redesign of the control
> > center right now (from the UI side, but I'd imagine it'd end up as a
> > complete rewrite anyway)...
> 
> Cool.  Is the "we" Sun?  I think a lot of us have the same desire.
> Would be good to work together on this.  Matthew has already started
> putting up some ideas and research:
> http://live.gnome.org/SystemSettings
> 
since that page mentions system-wide settings also, please have a look
at AdminKit, if you didn't yet:

http://blogs.gnome.org/rodrigo/2008/10/22/adminkit-001/

if you find anything against it, please tell me, I'd be glad to make it
fit our needs for this

as for the UI, the problems in libslab (used by the current g-c-c shell)
is speed and some dependencies (bonobo) that should be removed. The UI
design got a lot of usability testing during its development, so unless
you want to try something totally different, the libslab UI is the way
to go IMO. From that we could do some more usability tests and try
fixing the problems found. So I hope you're not starting from scratch.

As for rewriting the code, I don't know too much in detail the libslab
code, but maybe we could try to fix the issues from that code base? The
code is not too big, so it's not a huge task to re-architect it
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>