Re: no external panels for gnome-control-center [was GNOME Feature Proposal: Backup]

[David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com>]

Hi,

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Sergey Udaltsov
<sergey udaltsov gmail com> wrote:
> My whole point was that in the ideal world GNOME could be extensible
> enough so that no _forking_ would be necessary. Extension modules, not
> patches. That would be not a side effect of the license but the
> fundamental feature of the architecture. Do you see the difference?

Yes. I also think we tried that with GNOME 2 and failed. I mean, look
at GNOME 2's control center - on all distros, it's a royal mess of
random crap from either GNOME, the distro or 3rd party app written by
a kid in a basement. With GNOME 3.2, we will have a simpler control
center (since the extension mechanism is going away) but it will be
_awesome_.

Sure, the GNOME 3.x control center doesn't do all you need yet but the
point really is that we're engaging the current providers of control
center items to _work_ with GNOME. In particular, it means working
with designers. And in some cases (e.g. boot loader) the solution is
sometimes to not have a control center item... but maybe put the
feature in the "system restart" dialog instead. The other bonus thing
is that GNOME will _include_ the feature instead of each and every
distro doing their own thing. So in the long run everybody wins [1].

Extension- and plug-in systems is often the symptom of a disease.
Especially in young evolving software such as e.g. GNOME 3.x. Don't
succumb to it. Just say no.

    David

[1] : Except of course if some downstreams do development in their own
fucking sandbox.. no, this is not a cheap jab at Canonical.. it
includes e.g. Red Hat too. Or SUSE. Trust me when I say that the RH
desktop team and the RH team doing the system-config-* tools have
fought _a lot_ about these issues.