Re: Having external control panels in System settings

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 5:11 PM, Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org> wrote:
> 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

If distributions want advice on how to accommodate their needs with
GNOME they can always ask. We have this list and the distributors list
which can be used. It would be useful to hear what their concerns are.

> * 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.

Plenty of effort is already made in that respect. I have repeatedly
invited various designers (including those who work for Canonical) to
work on outstanding system settings design tasks in the past. As
always, those invitations remain open. I've also spent a fair amount
of time helping downstream contributors get involved in the design of
system settings - something which I'm prepared to keep doing.

> 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.
...

I think Jon's initial post to this thread sums up the current
situation very well. I can understand why people might be frustrated
at this state of affairs, but we really can't move any quicker than we
already are. If you do genuinely want to help the best thing you can
do is get in touch and start helping out.

Thanks for your comments Rodrigo!

Allan