Re: new modules consensus

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 03:51, Murray Cumming wrote:
> We need to make it clear to distros that we expect them to work on one set
> of system tools [1]. GNOME publishes source code for distros to integrate
> - so by publishing this we are encouraging them to integrate it properly
> into their distros.

For Fedora Core and Red Hat Desktop, I don't care if it's labeled
"GNOME" or not. The issue is whether the design is right. The value of
getting "system tools" (I don't like that name, it implies organizing
the code by whether root is required) upstream is that they can be
properly top-down designed and desktop integrated.

In fact Red Hat is actively contributing code to GNOME to do some
"system tools" stuff such as printing, hardware devices, networking. 
We are doing this all upstream and obsoleting much of our
system-config-* stuff.

I'm all for having "add a user" and "date and time" in GNOME, and once
they are good we'd like to drop the FC/RHD equivalent. But blanket
including the bootloader/services/network bits as well makes no sense to
me. I'm also concerned about the control center vs. g-s-t module split
affecting the UI design; it institutionalizes an implementation detail.

"Making it clear" that you expect distributions to work on one set of
tools is misguided. The problem GNOME should solve is getting the UI
right, not sending messages to distributions. I'm happy to see an
upstream solution rather than Red Hat specific stuff, but I also think
it's silly for upstream to copy a mistake we're actively trying to undo
in our OS.

Havoc