Re: Having external control panels in System settings

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On mar, 2012-02-07 at 00:54 +0000, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
> Allan,
> 
> > do so; indeed, I beleive that that commitment to collaboration is
> > particularly strong in the GNOME project.
> Glad to hear. That was definitely the case in GNOME2 days. I am not
> sure it is still absolute true with GNOME3. I would be glad to be
> wrong.
> 
instead of talking over and over about the (bad) intentions of one or
the other, I'd like to move this discussion to a more useful thing. So:

* distros still want to provide extensions
* we don't want anyone providing panels to avoid the GNOME2 mess in the
control center.

I agree with both of them, so let's try to find a solution. First of
all, the extension points Allan was talking about (and that are planned)
make a lot of sense for extending specific panels.

2nd, I think we should try to encourage more distros to participate more
in the design and development of the panels, thus maybe avoiding the
need for them to provide new panels. This is something that depends on
the distros and, also, on GNOME developers and designers, so on the
GNOME side, I think it would be good to do an extra effort to get the
distro people more involved.

William mentions the UI guidelines, but it's true that's not enough to
"force" good integration of external panels into the g-c-c shell. But at
least it's a good starting point.

Also, we discussed some time ago about providing the public API and
having a whitelist, so that only the blessed panels would show up. Thus,
distros would have to add new panels they want to show up to the
whitelist. This has the disadvantages of distros having to patch the
code, so not sure it is the best option.

Those are just quick thoughts, so please forgive me if I'm wrong, but
please let's try to move the discussion to a more useful outcome