Re: Extensible Shell

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hey,

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 6:25 PM, Thomas Wood <thos gnome org> wrote:
> 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.

I guess I don't really care either way. :)

>
>>
>> >  * 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?

Certainly a convenience for the panel.  The shell doesn't really know
about it.  I think it is pretty clean logically and will help keep
things consistent I think.  We can start to move common functionality
into the base class if necessary.

>
> 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!

In some cases maybe but not in this one.  The Hardware section should
have settings panels that pertain to individual hardware.  I think it
isn't cool to have two different panel to go to to setup things about
Keyboard hardware.  It also increases the cost of mistakes of choosing
the "wrong" one.

Also, I don't think having a shell gives us license to proliferate
panels.  This would be a huge mistake and is something that the GNOME
1 guys are really worried about with the shell idea in general.  If
after we are done here if we end up with more panels than we started
with we will have failed.

Jon