[FOLLOW UP] Better control center

["Kenneth Christíqua" <kenneth ripen dk>]

Hi all gnome-loving hackers,

     I talked to Miguel and Jonathan about my proposal
     for making a better control center. Miguel thought
     it has some good ideas, but Jonathan mentioned 
     some tecnical problems, and told me that he didn't
     have the time to work on this, but he would like to
     help working on the project if others want to do it.

     The problems were as follows:

        * We need to find a way of knowing what wm we
          are running without making some background/
          window-manager specific hacks

          My idea would be to use the environment variable 
          used by the defaultwm (or what it's called) script 
          in gnome-libs. And then change the wm-selector to
          change this environment variable too when changing 
          window managers.

          Then when you click on for instance desktop-properties, 
          it will look in the desktop-properties.desktop file. And is 
          this file there will be added some tags like enlightenment=
          e-desktop-capplet and icewm=icewmdesktop-capplet, etc.
          and if the control center doesn't find a tag that match the 
          environment variable, it will run the capplet under the gnome= 
          tag, for instance

        * It wouldn't be possible to have all the capplets
          looking alike, and Jonathan didn't like MS 
          approach by changing/hiding layouts. And totally
          different capplets will make the user confused
          
          A sollution to this could be to let a popop box 
          appear when you are running a supported wm.
          this popop box will then ask the user if he wants
          to load the enhanced windowmanager compatible
          capplet or not. We could also impliment a warning
          into the wm-selector capplet, so that when you 
          change wm, it will tell you that capplets can be 
          different.

        * Rewriting the E-configuration stuff as a capplet requires 
          a lot of work, especially because the way that E is
          designed makes it tricky to write it with full Try/Revert
          capabilities. 

        * We need hackers

       We would _REALLY_ like some of you to work on this project,
       so if any feel like it (It is a VERY good thing for GNOME), please
       don't hessitate to send me a mail

Kenneth.