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[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2013-03-21 at 00:17 +0100, drago01 wrote:

> >> Well it seems that nobody cares enough to do that work. So either it
> >> is not that important for the other desktop environments (user prefer
> >> to do do the configuration using other tools / text editors) or there
> >> is simply no one that cares enough *and* has the ability to step and
> >> do the work.
> >
> > Well, sure, but I don't place much faith in this exact formulation of
> > this common argument. 'Caring' isn't something that just magically
> > Happens or Doesn't Happen. It's not like anyone was maintaining s-c-*
> > before because it was a bundle of fun, they were maintaining them
> > because they were the Fedora system configuration tools. And, bluntly,
> > RH was paying most of them. But now RH's paid resources and most of the
> > 'we care because they're our most prominent configuration tools'
> > resources get re-directed into working on the GNOME tools, to the
> > detriment of the desktop-agnostic tools.
> 
> So RH cared and payed for the maintenance now RH no longer cares ....
> (you get the pattern)

That's not what I said at all. To put it cynically, my evaluation is
that RH kinda cares a bit (let's not get too carried away with how much
RH cares about the desktop at all...) that the most obvious bits of the
default desktop pretty much work. So when the default desktop used
desktop-agnostic tools, RH paid for those to be maintained. Now the
default desktop uses its own tools, RH pays for those to be maintained
instead. The default desktop is still happy: the desktop team has never
seen this as a problem because, for the desktop team, it is not a
problem. RH is happy; insofar as RH cares at all, which is only
moderately, it cares that GNOME works. For Fedora as a whole, I suspect
it's a problem that we have not been very good at recognizing and
formulating.

> >> Configuration tools that are part of and integrated into
> >> the desktop do offer a better and consistent user experience,
> >
> > They offer a better and more consistent user experience *for users who
> > use that desktop and only that desktop*. They offer a less consistent
> > user experience for users who use multiple desktops, and they offer
> > nothing at all for users who don't use that desktop.
> 
> Yeah so the goal would be to have such tools integrated in every
> desktop (upstream!) ... yes we are not their yet and probably should
> add something as a stop gap solution but the end goal for each desktop
> should be to provide a consistent and integrated UX and not a mixture
> of random tools that do not fit at all.

So two points, there: one, be careful of telling other projects what
their goals are. You don't like it when KK sends his sixth mail of the
week saying how GNOME should become exactly like KDE, and I doubt
fluxbox or LXDE users really think 'the end goal' of those projects
should be to write a bunch of configuration utilities.

Two, on a purely practical level, even if that were the end goal for
everyone, as you say, we are not there yet, or even close. Practically
speaking, I think we (Fedora) would be in a much better place if those
boring, old, unsexy, non-desktop specific, 'random' tools were properly
maintained and respected within the distro.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net