[Setup-tool-hackers] RE: gnome system tools

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

> From: Havoc Pennington [mailto:hp@redhat.com] 
>  - I wonder if we should be bundling the g-s-t discussion as a whole; 
>    the thread here already seems to be wanting to take some of the 
>    tools but not others. Is that an option or do they come as one 
>    framework/package?

I have suggested just a few of the tools because I think an all-or-nothing 
proposal risks leaving GNOME 2.6 with none of them. I think the maintainer 
would like all of them in 2.6.

>  - if you look at Red Hat Linux 9 or Fedora Core test, you 
> can see the 
>    UI consequence of having Preferences and also System Settings, 
>    sometimes with similarly-titled subitems.
>    Do we want to go here? Or do we want to do something more clever?

I'd be happy with a "System Settings" sub menu under the "Preferences" menu.

The control panels might be consolidated more, but that's a different 
discussion, I think.

>  - one thing that can be more clever is to avoid the tool entirely. 
>    e.g. Windows XP often doesn't make you configure a network at 
>    all, it basically just dhcp's any network card you plug in
>    and also monitors the link status and dhcps if you plug in 
>    a cable. So for a laptop for example, there's not much 
>    configuration to be done.

Obviously it would be good to make everything just work, but some people
will still need
to change settings sometimes. I think that having a GNOME Network control
panel that's the 
same on all distros is a step towards making networking easier in general.

I'd be very happy if we can one day hide these things deeply or relegate
them to some 
hacker-tools release set, but I don't think that idealism should stop us
from providing 
the functionality that people need now. Maybe I am too pragmatic.

>  - should part of the "backend" of certain tools be the hardware 
>    abstraction layer? A tool like redhat-config-sound is potentially 
>    a trivial HAL wrapper for example. Or HAL could expose list of 
>    network cards and notify on link status changes.

Do we want to wait for HAL?

Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc@usa.net
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