Desktop issues discussion proposal

[Gene C.]

On Wednesday 21 April 2004 15:57, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Razvan Corneliu C.R. d3vi1 VILT (razvan.vilt at linux360.ro) said:
> > Well... it seems like we have some small issues in the future path of
> > the fedora core desktop (not only for fedora actually).
> > 1) Menus. More is not the best solution, so it's out. We should try to
> > create a replacement, because in some situations the menus are
> > overwhelming.
> > 2) How many applications doing the same thing do we need? Having too
> > many applications can be confusing. A new user (especially one that
> > comes from another OS or from an old Linux distribution version), would
> > be confused and might not make the optimal choice for his situation.
> > Think of how many music players we have, how many editors, how many mail
> > clients. Should all these be in the equivalent of the now deprecated
> > X-Red-Hat-Base? Should we even show all the applications we have
> > installed or just the popular ones? A Microsoft style hide unused
> > entries would be practical? Are there any other solutions, such as 2/3
> > level menu tree?
>
> This are related. The answer is generally to just move stuff out of
> Core, and into Extras. Eventually, if the user explicitly decides
> to install 20 mail clients, that's their own problem, but the default
> OS install shouldn't do this to them, yes.

Some additional thought (besides what I posted in my other message):

How about the multiple desktops supported (gnome/metacity, gnome/sawfish, kde, 
xfce)?

How about upgrade support?  What happens during an upgrade when something 
(lets take sawfish) is moved from Fedora Core to Fedora Extras?  Will this 
break upgrade.

Some time ago there was a message posted to the fedora-config-list about a new 
package management tool: 
http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/config-tools/specs/redhat-config-packages

I believe such a tool may be necessary in order to do any shuffling of 
packages between Core and Extras (especially from Core to Extras).
-- 
Gene