Re: Having external control panels in System settings

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Tue, 2012-01-24 at 14:20 +0000, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> 2012/1/24 Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>
>         On Tue, 2012-01-24 at 00:07 +0000, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
>         
>         > Truth be told, the fact that new panels inside the module
>         doesn't give
>         > you more control, Ubuntu is changing quite a few things in
>         both
>         > existing panels and new ones. And let me tell you the
>         current result
>         > is far from pretty (a lot of modules are still the old
>         python based
>         > ccapplets).
>         
>         
>         Ubuntu don't ship GNOME. They use bits of GNOME to ship Unity.
>         
>         They're also the only distributor of those bits mangling the
>         panels in
>         that way, so I'd class them as the exception rather than the
>         rule.
> 
> 
> Is that it? Are you not going to comment on anything else of what I've
> said? I am really not at all interested in the whole Ubuntu vs. GNOME
> flame war that you seem so keen on bringing up.

You brought up the fact that Ubuntu is shipping an overly modified
version of gnome-control-center, where they do what they want, and not
what we, as upstream, would want them to ship.

>  As a GNOME contributor, I want to discuss how things get done in
> GNOME, and this topic affects Ubuntu as much as it affects any other
> distributor.
> 
> 
> But the main reason I care about this point is not because of
> distributors, it is about ISVs that I care about. I want them to be
> able to extend it in a way that makes sense. Dropbox or the nVidia
> specific settings are valid use cases for this, there's no way such
> items will go upstream, and by keeping the gates into the CC panel
> closed, we are forcing ISVs to ship those configuration panels as
> standalone apps, which diminishes the overall GNOME experience (I'd
> say users are likely to look after such settings in the control center
> panel, don't you think?).

Dropbox is a proprietary app. You can't have proprietary panels as
gnome-control-center is GPL.

nVidia have been refusing to implement XRandR in a way that means that
they would use the same configuration application as everybody else. And
it's proprietary software.

nVidia's driver configuration should implement XRandR and then users
would use the Display panel. A Dropbox equivalent, like Sparkleshare,
would integrate in the Privacy and Sharing panel.

> There are APIs to do this in Mac OS X, and I've never seen more than
> one or two extra items installed in a ac OS X host (mostly growl, the
> notification thingie), given the amount of audience that such platform
> has, I really don't buy your argument that by opening up such
> interface the gates of hell are going to open.

You mean like Google not adding their Music Manager inside the System
Preferences?
http://www.maclife.com/article/features/getting_started_music_beta_google

>  Again, there is a fundamental difference between placing a .desktop
> in a given menu structure and extending an application with a plugin.
> 
> 
> I find it a bit odd that we care so much about the mess that happened
> before and we are not doing an in depth analysis on why it
> happened. Why don't we try this approach and if things get messy, then
> we figure out what to do? 

It happened because people thought that we weren't interested, or they
didn't want to talk to us, or couldn't talk to us. One major problem was
that there were no maintainers. At least there were no full-time ones
for nearly 2 years before Richard and I got assigned to work on it.

/Bastien, still no external panels