Re: Some general facts about panel and gnome

[Hassan Aurag <aurag crm umontreal ca>]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

On 1/13/00, 7:02:37 AM, Miguel de Icaza <miguel@gnu.org> wrote regarding 
Re: Some general facts about panel and gnome:


> >  Fact 1: There should a recent accessed-modified document sub-menu.
> > This is implemented in Windows and is a good idea! This sub-menu is of
> > course a gnome_private thing. It should of course be created by gmc or
> > its descendant with mime-types and all!

> Agreed.  This very feature was part of the ideas we originally had
> back when GNOME was started.

> Some of this was implemented as part of the gnome recently-used
> mechanism.  But lack of integration and lack of use of these framewrok
> (and agreed, it is not the best one) made this feature less valuable
> than we had intended to.

> Doing this is not completely hard;  It would requiere a few things:

>       1. Go trough all the GNOME applications that deal with documents
>          and add a call to the gnome_history_recently_used function.

>       2. Add support to the panel to display the information recorded.

>       3. Optionally: enhance the applications by mimicking the GNOME
>          GhostView code to show a list of the recently used files by a
>          given application.  This one needs a bit more of code, and we
>          should try to provide a library call to do all this work (but
>          it would only be available for gnome-libs-2 applications).


 I will wait for that one! I really am sorry, but I am not good at C 
coding!

> >  Fact 3: There should be a device manager for God's sake! Either we do
> > it, or I will go beg kernel developers to make one (as they did with
> > make xconfig), however it will probably be Tcl/Tk and not Gnome! I
> > already suggested that but no one even discussed it!

> What exactly is a device manager?  And what would the role of this
> device manager be?

> Is this something that would enable users to access cdroms and
> floppys correctly?

 Nope, a device manager is something that lets you set irqs and other 
things for your devices. 
 Something like "My Computer" in Windows. 

 You don't however need to rewrite everything. Example: setserial sets 
all serial cards. So all one has to do is to write a nice interface 
with one irq entry, and whatever else is set by setserial!

 Of course this would also be extended to other devices (I am talking 
about /dev/*) that one has in his/her computer! 

 In other words a Gnome GUI for all those, kernel tools that set stuff 
for your device!

 I gave the example of my RedHat 5.0 install two years ago. I spent a 
month trying to understand why the hell my modem was not working 
(maybe I am dumb) to discover that I could set irqs with setserial!

 Well there was no gnome at that time but if it was there, a nice 
extension to the present "System Information" applet would have let me 
set it in 5 minutes. I knew it had to be irq 5 and not 4! But I didn't 
even know how to find irq given by kernel! I didn't even know what a 
kernel!!!!!!!!!! 

> >  Fact 4: Either tell enlightenment (best window manager in my opinion)
> > folks to be compliant or fork if you wanna keep it as default gnome
> > window manager! Someone with good window manager knowledge should do
> > it! I have yet to see another decent window manager for gnome that is
> > at least not completely ugly! We NEED a default 100% compatible window
> > manager by default. Other are welcome to comply if they wish!

> Most users these days think that sawmill is the best GNOME window
> manager out there; Many people think Sawmill has a very good code
> base, uses little memory, it is very efficient and has exceptional
> extensibility trough its build-in scripting language (all of Sawmill's
> features are implemented as scripts, even GNOME compliancy is done by
> a script)

 Ok, then go with sawmill, and integrate it completely!

> >   Fact 5: I don't know if this redhat's problem or gnome's. It's the
> > file manager! I know you guys are re-writing it from scratch. Anyway,
> > avoid the following problem: I keep setting my zip drive icon in the
> > gmc icon link on my desktop along with other 'disk' icons. Except that
> > cdrom is not there. That's ok with me, but each time I mount a CDROM,
> > all devices are re-scanned and all their icons are reset to default.
> > THIS IS BAD!

> Ok, this is indeed a bug.  Could you please fill a bug report so that
> it can be processed?  Check http://bugs.gnome.org, or use the
> "gnome-bug" script or the "bug-buddy" system to submit a bug report.

 I will do that

> >  Fact 7: We need to talk to several software vendors to make their
> > stuff support gnome one way or the other! Example: staroffice can plug
> > itself in KDE and CDE. They should do the same with gnome.

> Yes, agreed.  Are you interested in pursuing this task?  I would be
> very glad if you took an active role in the GNOME world by doing this
> kind of tasks and pointing out these problems to companies like star
> office.

 I have always done that. Bought a Canon printer and asked them about 
a Linux version of their software. Bought a zip drive and did the same 
with Iomega. I can forward their answer if you wish!
 Same thing with my modem......

 I can email Sun's folks if you wish. But we need some kind of polite 
Slashdot effect here!


> Best wishes,
> Miguel.