Re: Having external control panels in System settings

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Tue, 2012-01-31 at 12:10 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-01-24 at 13:16 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> 
> > And making it useful for people also means that we don't want random
> > crap in the control-center that muddles the UI, and makes it less useful
> > for people. We, GNOME System Settings developers and designers, have a
> > big picture view that the writers of separate panels won't have.
> 
> I completely understand the sentiment behind this.  The current design
> is really very nice - I saw all the work that went into making things
> consistent and with as few panels as possible, and it's just top-notch
> work.
> 
> The big picture view that you mention needs to be communicated to
> external users, so that they can see the thinking behind the control
> center's philosophy.  It's not a dumping ground for options; the wiki
> page you linked ( https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/ ) makes
> it very clear that the control center is for settings that don't have
> the context of an application.  We can communicate this philosophy in
> the API docs, in the headers for the public API, etc.
> 
> One recurring pattern in Gnome is that downstreams implement the missing
> bits they see lacking in Gnome; then they figure out that they have
> implementations for similar things, and an effort gets made to
> merge/upstream them.  The way to make that as easy as possible is by
> having a well-documented and reasonably stable API - instead of pulling
> out patches from disparate "gnome-control-center" packages, you can just
> look at some nicely isolated plugins.

You say:
"very clear that the control center is for settings that don't have the
context of an application"
and then:
"they figure out that they have implementations for similar things"

I'm afraid that I see those as conflicting. There's really not that many
people working on non-application infrastructure, and since we started
working on gnome-control-center for GNOME 3, only some core GNOME
hackers have contributed to new panels.

(The one exception is Deja-Dup, but it was refused for implementation
reasons rather than because the functionality wasn't interesting)

<snip>
> [recommending that apps don't install random crap in the control center]
> > We did that, and they still did. When we shipped with external control
> > panels enabled. For one release.
> 
> Have some healthy contempt for them - it's *their* problem :)

Except that I'm the one receiving bug reports for their mistakes. I
won't provide them with the gun to shoot themselves in the foot.