Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu> writes: 
> Maybe we are using a somewhat different definition of operating system.
> When users install MacOS/X, from a technical standpoint one could argue
> that they are installing the BSD operating system with the Aqua
> graphical shell. Of course, very few people think of it this way because
> unless you start digging the entire user experience is Aqua aka
> MacOS/X.

What I mean by operating system is the whole deal, including GNOME.
However, to users, this "whole deal" is labeled Red Hat or Solaris or
whatever, most likely. Because that's what it says on the box when you
buy it.  GNOME is a component used to build that. But GNOME is not
going to be able to replace the whole thing, not even all the GUI
bits.

Mozilla, OpenOffice, Java/Swing - these are not going away in any
interesting timeframe. If we succeed on the desktop, apps will be
appearing from Windows, and I doubt most of them will be GTK-native
either. If we don't have important infrastructure such as font
configuration, device management, printing, etc. below the GNOME
layer, then users will get hosed.

> So we provide XST as a part of GNOME and hope distributors choose to
> write XST backends before release rather than re-inventing their own
> interface crack for everything.

I agree that it would be nice to avoid reinvention, at the same time,
I think the attitude that you have here is not going to help.

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.

If you want to extend into trying to solve all the UI problems of the
whole operating system, instead of just creating a good desktop
component, then you're going to have to look at working with the whole
OS and various relevant open source projects, instead of just the
GNOME Project. We have got to think bigger-picture if we want to have
a bigger impact.

Which isn't to say we shouldn't add XST, I'm undecided on that right
this minute. (It's probably a 2.2 question anyhow.) But it is to say
that we shouldn't think of GNOME as an operating system, because it
isn't. It's one project that makes up the set of free software
projects that typically make up an OS.

Havoc