Re: Control Center 3.0

[Jens Granseuer <jensgr gmx net>]

On Fri, 2009-11-20 at 17:51 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-11-20 at 12:52 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> > > > * a common way to change 'system' properties (i.e. a way to become
> > > root
> > > > when needed)
> > > How do you plan to do it so that it would work in all distros???
> > 
> > I don't know, what solutions do we have? This is mainly to set things
> > like 'default background' I guess.
> 
> Today we do this in Fedora through a GConf patch (I think the GConf bit
> is upstream already) - it looks like this
> 
>  http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gconf-polkit-default-background.png
>  (note: the latest polkit version has features to make the auth dialog text
>   look nicer - e.g. display "Authentication is required to change the
>   background for all users" - we're just not using it yet)
> 
> and was written by Matthias Clasen (patch is sitting in bugzilla
> somewhere - IIRC someone didn't like it).

I guess that someone was me, and I still don't like it. The approach is
broken and scales even worse than the list of capplets we currently have
in the menu. You start with adding a button for "set background
system-wide", then you add "set desktop font system-wide", "set theme
system-wide", and "set proxy system-wide", and then you blink and
realise you've cloned every single button in the preferences and added a
"system-wide" variety. (And no, I'm not making that stuff up (at least
not completely); some requests are already in bugzilla).

I don't remember where it was mentioned but I suppose it was either in a
mail from Calum Benson, or from Matthew Thomas, where it was talked
about adding a generic way of being able to make all settings apply
system-wide without adding tons of UI clutter. Now, that's something
that would make a lot of sense, but simply adding legions of duplicate
buttons doesn't.

Jens