Re: Swallowed apps

[Phil Dumont <phil solidstatescientific com>]

> At the risk of repeating and poorly paraphrasing Havoc's more
> thoughtful response:
> 
> There is a range of possibilities for preferences and configurability
> that spans zero and zillions. Zero is obviously bad. We want
> configurability. But zillions also is bad, for reasons Havoc
> already explained (more articulately than I could - see
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-March/msg00772.html).
> In the middle is a lot of hard work and thought about each and every
> preference and option - should it be there or not? As Havoc argued,
> each one has a cost. What's the corresponding benefit?
> 
> As Havoc put it:
> 
>   The only useful question to ask is: how will you choose which
>   options to include? 
> 
>   Metaphysics about "options bad" or "options good" are always silly,
>   given that. Having zero options is nonsense, having all options is
>   nonsense, choosing some options makes sense. How will you choose the
>   options?
> 
>   The only productive conversation is to answer that question.


Yeah, how to choose options is a difficult question to answer.  But
certainly, a part of the answer is that, if an option is already there,
then there's a good chance that someone is already using it, and if it
is removed, someone will miss it.  The impact of removing an existing
option is greater than the impact of not introducing an option that
has never been there, and therefore should be done with care.

I gather from what I've read in this thread that there are enough
problems with swallowed apps, and few enough people who miss it, that
it's deemed not worth holding on to.  That's too bad.  For what it's
worth (not much, I guess), I'm one more person who'll miss it.  And I
didn't know it had problems -- it always worked the way I used it.

How do I use it?  I have my emacs configured so that all frames
are minibufferless -- there is a single one-line frame that is
minibuffer only, and all other emacs frames share that minibuffer.
The minibuffer frame is the swallowed app.  (It sounds weird, but
once you get used to it, it's rather nice.)  I also have a swallowed
xload.

In another post to this thread, someone said something to the effect
that if anyone cares enough about it to fix the problems, then
further discussion would be productive.  A valid point.  Maybe,
someday...  But then again, discussion before the fix happens
might be worthwhile.  I might be more motivated to fix it if I
had some level of confidence that Gnome would put the feature back
in if it were fixed...?

By the way, the old "Common Desktop Environment" (CDE) had a similar
feature.  That's where I first started using a dedicated emacs
minibuffer -- where it was swallowed into the CDE panel.  Does
anyone out there know if CDE's "swallowed apps" (or whatever they
called it) had the same problems as Gnome's?  If not, would it be
possible (both technically and legally) to use CDE's approach to
it in Gnome?

phil