Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

Havoc, wrote :
> Part of the reason you see reinvention from the operating system is
> the fact that GNOME occasionally insists on doing its own proprietary
> solutions that don't fit in to the system as a whole, or that don't
> fit in to a reasonable long-term vision of the open source UNIX
> platform as a whole, or that haven't considered all the requirements
> of an OS primarily targetted at servers and technical users. Just .02
> for your consideration.

GNOME may not be the OS, and we should not want to be the OS.
However, there will always be a boundary layer where we need to
interact and some cases configure.  I'll pick an example near and
dear to my bug list.

    Font installation.

This is a problem that is specific to
    - OS
    - Distributions
    - Version numbers
    - Probably a pile of other things that don't leap to mind

However, to my mind this is a critical element of the user
experience.  Pango may have the slickest rendering system known to
man.  Gnome-Print may generate anti-aliased previews that have them
drooling in the aisles, but neither is terribly useful unless the
font subsystem is properly tuned and configured.  This issue has
many layers all of which need to be functional for applications to
be functional.
    - Display fonts
	: Availability
	: Fall backs for different encoding so that something is
	  displayed.
    - Print fonts
	: How to map to display fonts
	: How to find out where they are installed.
    - Common substitutions for unknown fonts.
	: 'MS Bizaaro Bold 9' should display/print the same way in
	  all gnome applications.

We don't have solutions to these for gnome-2.0.  However, IMHO
the eventual solution would belong in the core gnome platform.