Re: Do we need DBusMenu in the Shell?

[Mystilleef <mystilleef gmail com>]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Giovanni Campagna
<scampa giovanni gmail com> wrote:
> Open Planet GNOME. Almost half of the latest posts relates on GNOME, KDE
> and Canonical collaboration story, which is all around libappindicator
> and StatusNotifier / dbusmenu.
> One year ago, libappindicator was rejected because it needed integration
> in GNOME Shell and Gtk+. Three days, Unity was unveiled, and everything
> went well with considering Ubuntu community the "bad guys" that forked
> GNOME, starting with Ayatana. I of course know this is not true, but
> this is the impression I got from the outside (I only started
> contributing to GNOME some months later).
> Today, on the other hand, things reversed. Public opinion is now that
> GNOME rejected, and still is opposing, Canonical per se. And of course,
> all the flaming around GNOME Census didn't help here. We don't want a
> large part of our user base to consider GNOME Shell a Red Hat project
> (again, this is what is perceived from the outside).
> First, because this is not true: not just Novell, Intel, and all the
> various other companies, but also a great of individuals are making up
> what GNOME 3 will be, in Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian, Gentoo, Arch and
> maybe Ubuntu as well.
> Second, because even if all developers were paid by one organization, we
> would have failed if we didn't pass the message that GNOME is a body, a
> project, and an organization, but most important GNOME is a community of
> people, working for the advancement of free software.
> We're about to release GNOME 3. We need the best publicity to have this
> adopted by the majority of people. After all, our goal is a GNOME
> desktop on every system, right? But if people switch to Xfce or KDE or
> Unity (or, ugh, Mac OS and Windows) for political issues with the
> project, rather than usability, design, technical bugs, then we're
> wasting our precious developer time.
> So I think we should give Canonical and the general public a big signal
> of collaboration. It doesn't matter if this will have no direct effect
> in terms of code and upstreaming of patches, we'll have done the right
> thing and people will know.
> The small step I'm talking about is support of DBusMenu icons in GNOME
> Shell Message Tray. Yes, it does not fit the design (which calls for
> notifications, not menus) and it is not used by anything inside GNOME
> now. But code is there, in a bug where I proposed for the status area;
> it would require some changes to adapt to last Gnome Shell version, but
> is mostly fine, and has no external dependencies (implements the DBus
> protocol directly).
> Anyway, the reason I'm proposing this is not technical (libnotify with
> persistence is by far better than StatusNotifier, I think we all agree
> here), it is political.
> We need to show we're open to technologies developed elsewhere, no
> matter how dirty they are. Look at browsers and HTML5, which is the most
> horrible application platform ever invented by man: they're all
> competing on who is be the most compatible with the others and with the
> spec.
> I hope this will start a positive discussion, at least to make sure
> we're not ignoring this, which is a serious issue from a PR standpoint.
>
> Giovanni Campagna
>
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GNOME could use some damage control from the marketing and PR teams. I
don't think code should be adopted for political reasons only
technical ones.