working with gnome project/other distros together on system tools (was: Re: System-config Reworking Proposal)

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 15:06 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> Just wondering: Why don't we work towards getting some sane config tools
> (seperated in UI, logic, ...) close to Gnome (and KDE, should there be
> interest)? Sure, that way other distros will benefit from out work as
> well, but on the other hand having stuff as de-facto part of Gnome and
> used by other distros afaics lead to better tools and a better user
> experience, which overall leads to a better "Linux".

This is actually what we've been working on in the RH/Fedora desktop
team for quite some time. The mantra here, as you point out, is both
"upstream", proper separation of the user interface and the mechanism,
access control and, ideally, integration with directory services such as
the Fedora Directory Server.

Actually for home/consumer desktop use, there is not much need for any
of the system-config-* tools any more; for example for F9, intlclock
will replace system-config-date and Søren's work on xrandr UI will
probably be able to replace most of system-config-display. The former,
at least, is getting merged into upstream GNOME as we speak. The latter,
I believe, will be proposed for GNOME as well. Søren?

As for server use... e.g. s-c-httpd and friends I'm not sure. I've
always found it rather odd to use an UI for this in the first place but
I do acknowledge that some of our users find this useful. It's
definitely something that is on the check-list of many system
administrators especially those from the Windows world.

In my opinion, the most important thing to fix with our remaining
system-config-* tools is to get upstream buy-in (ideally merge it into
GNOME/KDE/freedesktop.org/whatever), properly separate the UI from the
mechanism and use things like PolicyKit for access control. Notably, Tim
is doing a pretty good job here with s-c-printer; that's why Ubuntu got
the best printing support on the planet :-) [1]

      David

[1] : I'm being sarcastic because space boy doesn't always give credit
where credit is due. Sources have told me that someone is working on
"fixing" this problem though