Re: Having external control panels in System settings

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

Hi Jeremy,

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Jeremy Bicha <jbicha ubuntu com> wrote:
> 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).

That isn't really the issue. Backup is either something that is either
designed to be part of the OS or it isn't. If it is then it needs to
be designed to be integral with GNOME. It has not been so far [1]. If
it is integral with GNOME then it should be part of the system
settings - and potentially have other points of integration throughout
the system. This has nothing to do with Deja Dup. This is just the way
things need to work. Operating system components are not apps. The
author gets to choose: OS or app.

Where the code lives may be a practical matter that makes development
a pain in the ass for contributors but the primary problem is one of
conception.

Jon

[1] https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Potential/Backups