Re: [system-tools] Is there any plan to include more tools?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Hi!

Actually, the GNOME System Tools aren't very actively developed
currently. I'm the only developer and I'm mainly working on users-admin.
So there are really no plans to add other tools, even if we don't refuse
contributions, of course!

I think distributions that use the GST ship system-config-printer or a
custom tool to configure printing. system-config-printer is working nice
with cups AFAIK (using Ubuntu here), and there's no reason why it
shouldn't be used as a kind of official GNOME tool. So there's no real
need for a replacement in the GST.

As regards network configuration, network-admin has not been actively
developed for a few years, and I don't really see any future to it.
People should really switch to Network Manager, and file bugs there if
it doesn't suit their needs. NM is the unified tool for GNOME, and it's
getting better and better with releases.

I think the GST are going to disappear progressively, even if I try to
make they work best in the meantime. users-admin will likely end
replaced by a new users tool [1], people from Red Hat are talking about
a new time applet for the control center, etc. For now, only
services-admin has absolutely no replacement, and shares-admin only has
partial replacement.

As a general rule, I believe separate tools with separate code designs
are better since they allow to adapt closely to the specifics of the
configuration object you deal with. Now that our desktop is getting more
and more integrated, the model of the GST where you have the same
get/set model for all objects reaches its limits and becomes hard to
maintain/fix/improve.


Is there an implied question in your mail I didn't address? To sum up,
if you simply want better tools to configure your GNOME desktop, then
you can help new projects I quoted above. Thanks for your interest,
anyway! I'd still be happy to fix precise bugs in the tools if that's
possible.


Regards


1: http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/mclasen/2010/01/15/old-promises/