Re: control center plans, etc.

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Bradford Hovinen <hovinen ximian com> writes: 
> Much of this is similar to what has been done in CVS HEAD. Currently the
> capplets run in standalone dialogs and libcapplet has been relegated to
> a very simple wrapper that creates a dialog box with Ok and Cancel
> buttons. The library is present entirely for reasons of backward
> compatibility. The shell itself allows some flexibility in viewing the
> capplets, though I did that to reflect the principle of least
> commitment.

Cool that sounds good.

> Reading down this thread I have found several messages suggesting that
> there should not be a shell at all. While I generally agree that the
> need for a shell is minimal when users are running Nautilus, having such
> a shell available is useful for folks who do not wish to run a file
> manager.

I don't mind the shell existing, so no disagreement there. It should
be trivial to support both the shell and menu/filemanager access.
 
> What concerns me most right now is that the capplets are becomming
> nightmarishly difficult to maintain, especially the older ones that I
> have not rewritten. This is in large part due to the XML archiving
> features I added. I want to do some major internal surgery to make the
> capplets easier to program. In particular, the developer should not be
> concerned with how to get the capplets to work with location management
> and rollback -- it should all just work. Thus I need some library
> support for this and, after discussing the issue with Dietmar Maurer, I
> am leaning towards bonobo-conf for the task.

GConf has this whole "ChangeSet" feature that was designed for making
try/revert easy (oops, that didn't turn out to be useful...)

Anyway, I don't know if it's relevant. I haven't looked at the
profile/rollback features yet. Please coordinate with GConf as
required, I know at least some settings will need the GConf backend
moniker (e.g. double click time for GTK 2 goes through that).

So I think the huge feature I want to see is simply major UI help as
to which capplets exist and what they do. Sounds like rewriting all
the capplets though, so it's an incremental task not a
all-done-by-GNOME-2 kind of thing probably.

Havoc