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

[Nils Philippsen]

On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 12:28 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> 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

... as the tool that is launched when you click on your (GNOME) panel
clock -> "Adjust Date & Time". I don't see s-c-date going away anytime
soon (as the maintainer I'm a bit biased), at least as long as the DE
specific tools are full replacements.

>  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]

Well, the idea of "whatever upstream" is most appealing to me as that
can as well be us ;-). Mind that as configuration tools aren't only
interesting to desktop users we should be careful under which umbrella
(if one) we put them. I'm with you as far as UI <-> logic <-> privileged
ops separation is concerned.

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary
 Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."  --  B. Franklin, 1759
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