Re: Having external control panels in System settings

[Jeremy Bicha <jbicha ubuntu com>]

On 7 February 2012 07:15, Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl> wrote:
>> I think that Deja Dup or Dropbox or Ubuntu One, are perfect examples, they
>> are not applications, they don't help the user to achieve a task, they are
>> just settings for a system wide specific service, we can't anticipate every
>> single way in which third parties are going to need to extend it, so I
>
> I see this differently. I rather have something well integrated. Not a
> random mashup of "things you can configure". I don't want to configure
> "Deja Dup", I might want to configure my backup. I'd like a backup
> setting which takes care of that. Part of the OS, not something for
> which I first install Deja Dup.

Of course, Deja Dup (on Ubuntu) installs itself as the Backup panel in
System Settings. And Deja Dup was proposed for inclusion in System
Settings but it was rejected because the developer didn't want to use
GNOME architecture (but there are GNOME external dependencies that
don't use GNOME architecture either; intltool in fact even uses
Launchpad too).

> Dropbox, I don't see why it should be in system settings? Just because
> we have something where you can put settings doesn't make it for me
> logical that you put Dropbox there.
>
> Ubuntu One, that for me is an online account. Configure it there. Having
> the same stuff all over the place is just messy.

Online Accounts is specifically not extensible. It's especially odd
that Online Account has such prominence in GNOME 3.2 and 3.4's user
menu when it only allows setting up a Google or Windows Live account,
which should only need to happen once. Instead of advertising the
feature, the feature should just be there when you open Chat,
Contacts, Documents, or whatever could benefit from the single sign on
feature.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-October/msg00044.html.

>> don't think that fine grained extensibility cuts it (ie through GOA). Going
>> further, someone might want to do a GNOME OS Server Edition and might want
>> to add advanced control of networking settings (such as setting up network
>> bridges and VPNs), a panel to control a network SAN or a specific printer,
>> those are third party system components that make little sense upstream
>> given our focus but that still make sense.
>
> If you have specialized needs and want to modify GNOME somehow, then
> just patch GNOME.

But what if everyone has specialized needs? Fedora could definitely
benefit from the control panel being extensible for instance.

Jeremy