Re: gnome-panel & gnome-applets?

[Juanjo Marin <juanjomarin96 yahoo es>]

On Thu, 2010-12-23 at 15:01 -0600, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 12:54, Carlos Garcia Campos
> <carlosgc gnome org> wrote:
>         I disagree. If I run gnome-session with the classic mode I
>         expect to
>         see exactly what I have right now, with all the applets. The
>         definition of essential applet is probably different for every
>         user.
> 
> I am not a designer but I've been paying attention to this process for
> about 1.5 years now so I think I can address your concerns.
> 
> We are on the path of ending the insanity of behavior customization
> with GNOME 3 (though all are welcome to help with the maintenance of
> the gnome-applets module, of course.) Obviously, personalization is
> staying (wallpaper, themes, cursors, sounds, preferences). In GNOME 3,
> the objective is create a desktop that actually works out of the box;
> one that doesn't require that you help your family members fiddle with
> a bunch of settings before it's a tolerable experience. (For example,
> the very first thing I kill is the workspace switcher and show desktop
> applets because no family member can comprehend looking at them to
> figure out where all their windows just went after they accidentally
> click them. In Shell these are replaced with the same features but in
> a way which has an actual usable UI.)
> 
> This means stopping the abuse of applets which in some cases are
> stand-ins for something that should be a "desktop widget" (Finance and
> Deskbar, for example)[1] and in other cases are horrible hacks that
> try to "fix" bad design elsewhere in the OS (battery charge applet
> predates g-p-m, for example). Others are just a pointless toys which
> are maintenance burden. In most cases the outcome will be that some
> combination of the legacy notification area icons and essential
> applets will provide access to hardware-related and session-related
> functions in the order and locations they located in the Shell design.
> Clearly, network, keyboard, power, a11y, sound, bluetooth, system,
> applications and clock are staying. Probably launchers. Places is a
> long-term unknown. There are going to be others; the list is still a
> work in-progress.
>  
>         GNOME 2 fallback experience should be gnome-panel, metacity
>         and
>         gnome-applets.
> 
> It's a fallback but it's also going in to long-term maintenance mode
> which means we need to have a coherent experience between the
> "compatible" and Shell desktop environments. And they need to continue
> to adapt to API changes. Try to imagine the next major vertical
> hardware integration to come along, say, for example, that we get a
> desktop-wide, WiFi supported, geolocation API with privacy guards. Now
> we have to write a geolocation indicator and UI for both shells. (Just
> speculating.)
> 
> We're planning for the future here and for one in which everyone has a
> good experience without having to muck around.

Though I agree that we must planning the future, we also need to give a
migration path for our users. There are big deployments out there, and
sometimes they need _time_ for evaluating the new features, updating
their hardware if necessary,  adapting their configurations, etc.

I think that it is even a good idea to give a maintenance promise for a
specific period of time for gnome-panel, metacity and gnome-applets.

But, talk is cheap and I don't know if we as a project can made this
promise.

Just my two cents,

  -- Juanjo Marin