Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: magic desktop URIs

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com> writes:
> 
> I personally would use a word like "preferences" or "settings" rather
> than "config". Especially if you have three similar places and one is
> "preferences" but the other two are "config". I would probably call
> these three things "control panels" too, rather than "preferences".
> 
> The distinction between user preferences and system preferences is a
> quite-confusing one for a single-user system. It would not occur to me
> to look for the date in "system config." rather than in
> "preferences".

Right, the challenge we have is that many of the expected users of Red
Hat Linux are on a multiuser system. I'm sure this is true for most OS
vendors deploying GNOME at the moment.

It has to somehow be clear to people that changing some things affect
everyone, and changing some other things only affects themselves.
However perhaps that could be done by changing the control panels
themselves to make this clear.

Also, I *really* don't want to dump Apache config in with the "Fonts &
Colors" control panel - that seems like a pretty bad idea to me. 
But also since we expect many RH users to want Apache config, we don't
want to hide it behind the need to switch to Advanced userlevel, it
should be quick to find if you want it.

I don't know the best solution.

> Perhaps the system config. and server config. should be folders
> (symlinks to folders, really, I guess) inside "preferences:" rather
> then separate top-level URIs?

If we put them there, then they aren't really preferences (I'm
remembering your prefs vs. settings point). Certainly network
configuration is something you can screw up, not just an arbitrary
preference.

What do you think about server-settings: and system-settings: or
something? This would still having system-settings: as a subfolder of
preferences: by simply putting an appropriate .desktop file in
/usr/share/control-center.

But if we want to merge system settings and user prefs, we need all
the control panels dumped into /usr/share/control-center directly, and
only one URI scheme.

Hard problem.

Havoc