Re: Proposed: gnome-system-tools

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

>While g-s-t might be good technology,
>its not clear that it offers a better user experience than what the
>distros offer.

Please note that not everyone uses Red Hat. I use Slackware or Debian most
of the time and I welcome g-s-t because the default ISOs have no such gui
tools. Other distros don't either (e.g. gentoo and many others).

You could argue that "the distro vendors should decide to include g-s-t or
not", but the reality is, it is very difficult to get the distro makers
actually include non-official and not-well-known apps on the default
distribution, even if you, as a user, know that they are needed. I know
personally with Slackware, Patrick is not an easy person to deal with when
asking to add a new app in the distro (subversion, fam, rhythmbox was out of
the question for him too ;-). However, he would have no problem including
those if g-s-t was part of the Gnome official desktop (hint for novell: same
thing about Evolution, from what Pat told me a few months ago ;-). It seems
that distributors feel "safer" when something comes along an official gnome
release rather than stand-alone.

I am _not_ saying that this makes g-s-t  --which his purely administrative
software-- elligible to be included with the gnome desktop release, however
including it would help underdog distros and supported unices that don't
have armies of paid developers that create custom system gui tools. Gnome
can offer a more complete solution to these "underdogs" and that can only be
a strong point for gnome, strategically-speaking.

I would personally prefer Gnome to be truly versatile for all unix users and
integrate with the underlying system for as many distros/unices as possible,
instead of cutting down features just because suse/mdk/rh don't really need
them cause they got their own equivelant gui tools. In fact, it is easier
for suse/mdk/rh to remove g-s-t from their distros when they are packaging
gnome (if they want their users to only use their tools), than to endanger
other unices/distros from failing finding out about the usefulness of g-s-t
to their product.

And lastly, I would friendly advise the maintainer of g-s-t to focus
development on the major unices/bsds/linuces that don't have such gui tools.
Adding FreeBSD, Solaris and full Gentoo support for example, can help make
g-s-t more important on platforms that it would matter the most at this
point and win the impressions.

Regards,
Eugenia