Re: Having external control panels in System settings

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2012-01-23 at 15:32 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> [Er, sorry if you get a duplicate - I sent the other one from the wrong email address :( ]
> 
> On Mon, 2012-01-23 at 15:20 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> 
> > That's the point. We don't want to integrate everything into the system
> > settings. We want to include the things that make sense, and to be able
> > to say what makes sense, we need to act as gatekeepers.
> 
> What's required to make a new panel in the control center, anyway?
> Don't you just have to implement a GIOModule that basically returns a
> widget, which the control center's shell embeds within itself?
> 
> Being able to implement such modules outside g-c-c's source tree would
> be convenient for people who need configurability for things that Gnome
> doesn't contemplate.
> 
> This isn't about "should Gnome control everything", but rather about
> "let people make Gnome as useful as possible for them".

And making it useful for people also means that we don't want random
crap in the control-center that muddles the UI, and makes it less useful
for people. We, GNOME System Settings developers and designers, have a
big picture view that the writers of separate panels won't have.

>   We can
> certainly recommend that apps don't install random crap in the control
> center, and that the control center be left for things that can't be
> sensibly contained within a single application.

We did that, and they still did. When we shipped with external control
panels enabled. For one release.

The problem is that it's really either random crap, or it should be in
the upstream control center. Feel free to add those that should be to
the design page:
https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/