Re: Extensible Shell

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 09:58 -0500, William Jon McCann wrote:

> > I'm hoping Jon can describe a bit more about how the shell, panels and
> > pages interact. From what I can see at the moment, the shell will parent
> > the panel object, but it does not interact with the pages object.
> >
> > I have a few questions to start off the discussion:
> >
> >  * Why do CcPanel and CcPage derive from GtkAlignment rather than (e.g.)
> > GtkBin.
> 
> I don't think it makes too much difference.  An alignment is a bin
> with flexible positioning for children.

Except I don't think we want to use any of those features in the
capplets. I think Bin is a better choice as it's more abstract and less
implicit.



> 
> >  * Why does the shell not create a notebook for the panel and pack pages
> > into it? CcPanel would then not need to derive from GtkWidget.
> 
> Panels don't need to be implemented as notebooks.  At an earlier stage
> I had Panels derive from notebooks but this turned out to not be
> desirable.  Some panels will be purely singleton pages and some will
> be notebooks with other controls packed above or below them.  See the
> current keyboard or sound capplets for example.
> 
> But also I think panels should be more or less able to do what they
> think is best.

So, what's the purpose of the CcPage object then, in terms of the shell?



Another questions:

In the extensible-shell branch, you merged the keyboard settings and
keyboard shortcuts capplets.

Given that we now have a single window and search feature, does it still
make sense to be combining lots of settings into single capplets? Would
it be better to take a "do one thing and do it well" approach? I even
seem to have difficulty remembering that "font preferences" are found
under "appearance", for example!

Regards,

Thomas