A couple of serious questions

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 09:30 -0700, Vlad wrote:
> There are some distro-specific utilities that probably won’t find a
> home in fd.o. Notable examples include the Anaconda installer, package
> manager, 

True. And I noted that later in my mail but you conveniently skipped
that part.

> X.org configurator, 

Wrong; with xrandr 1.2 this will get fixed and the desktop environments
can ship distro agnostic tool for this.

> user account manager, 

Possibly. I don't see why it should be Fedora specific though.

> mountpoint
> configurator, 

Uh, all modern Linux desktops uses HAL and either g-v-m/gnome-mount or
equivalent KDE stuff (e.g. media:/). Also, there's no system-config-*
tool for managing mount points and if there were, it wouldn't be suited
for desktop end users. Even if you wanted such a weird thing, it
wouldn't have to be Fedora specific.

> etc. It is up to the distro to create desktop-specific
> frontends for these utilities.  Some distros like K/Ubuntu are
> proceeding in a _systematic_ manner to separate function from GUI
> presentation while at the same time ensuring that the KDE frontend is
> just as comprehensive as the GNOME frontend.
> 
> Fedora’s attitude seems to be: “Forget KDE distro integration, we’re
> not going to bother”. But I’d love to be proven wrong :)

It's up to people to make it happen for E17, KDE or whatever like some
people are making it happen for GNOME. I'm just saying go do the work
upstream and try to avoid making it distro specific.

> PS: As others have pointed out, these concerns also apply to ncurses
> frontends (or lack thereof) on servers.

Certainly. That's important too.

     David