Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu> writes: 
> Definitely. GNOME needs to functioning and/or thinking of itself as an
> operating system rather than a thin graphical shell over the "real
> operating system".

Neither of those. GNOME might think of itself as a component designed
to drop in to an operating system and function seamlessly as part of a
usable OS. Remember most users will _not_ be downloading GNOME from
gnome.org, they will be getting it from OS vendors.

One bit of braindamage in thinking GNOME is an OS is that we start
reinventing lots of wheels at the wrong place in the dependency chain,
because we get the delusion that all apps that matter will use GNOME
stuff. And that's just not true - it's hubris plain and simple.

At some point, a decent user experience simply requires a lot of
OS-specific integration work. I don't think there's much way around
it. And certain kinds of progress are going to require new OS
features, such as file change notification, and removable media
handling, and USB/hotplug device handling, and PCMCIA handling, and so
on. Replacing the kernel with gnome-kernel or the PCMCIA scripts with
GNOME-pcmcia is just not a solution.

One of the pesky things about OS integration work is that it has to be
done _before_ the OS is released. Which is pretty tricky for the GNOME
project to do.

The implications of these metaphysics for XST are less clear, I talked
to Chema on the phone about it yesterday. 

Havoc