Re: Having external control panels in System settings

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Tue, 2012-02-07 at 10:53 -0500, Jeremy Bicha 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 was just one reason. On top of the reasons Jon mentioned, I think
that backup should be an integral part of the OS.

> > 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.

Online accounts is extensible. It's free software, send patches, get
them merged, it's extended. Saying that just because a system doesn't
allow you to write plugins it would be "closed" is completely wrong for
FOSS.

> >> 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.

It certainly wouldn't. It wpuld probably look even worse for all the 10
year old PyGTK "administration tools". See system-config-printer, which
was a Red Hat Linux project, getting replaced on GNOME-based systems by
the printers panel.

The people working on GNOME in Fedora want to ship upstream, not some
modified version of it, and I hope we do our best to (even if we weren't
so good about it in some past cases).