Re: Debian objectives for lenny ... desktop
Hi,
On Wed, Jan 03, 2007 at 07:28:58PM +0000, Luis Matos wrote:
> I know you are all busy with the etch release, but i will have time in
> beginning of February and i want to propose some issues, and get your
> opinion.
Great idea.
> First:
> My proposal is to be created, if possible, a desktop-enterprise task in
> tasksel.
> That task would include besides an enterprise oriented desktop, some
> enterprise oriented features.
This is certainly something to think about, and whether having more
tasks again will clutter up choices.
> Some of the features:
> - enterprise oriented desktop applications (forget synaptic and some
> other administrating tools)
Why forget synaptic? And what do you mean exactly with enterprise
oriented apps? Things like pessulus?
> - Have an unified artwork for all possible applications (splash screens
> mostly), icons and so on.
I still think we should mostly go with the upstream artwork here, i.e.
to respect GNOME and KDE's upstream choices.
As for splash screens, our aim should be to not have any, but rather
have the application start immediately. It's not really our duty to
optimize this, however, so maybe unified splash screens are a good
interim solution.
> - provide integrated software for the environment and provide the
> same on all 3 (gnome, kde and xfce)
Yes.
> - seek for group work application's compatibility out of the box.
Can you elaborate on this?
> - provide boot to shutdown artwork (splashy or usplash - also a
> target for common desktop)
Yes.
> - smoothier desktop with a nice theme to combine with the artwork (i
> find the current theme a bit missplaced, also the icons, but there's
> another story.) ( industrial controls - more whitier - seem to be ok
> with clearlooks window)
See above for my comment on diverging from upstream. Probably by the
time lenny is released, everybody will (and can freely) use Tango icons.
> In gnome specially, which seems the most widely used for enterprise
> features, i would like to seek on other distribution's features that
> could have in debian, such prefer gnome-control-center instead of
> administration/preferences [1][2]. It's easier for users to find that
> nice place where everything is and they can really see what want to
> change.
Those are being discussed upstream. We should probably have some
certain set date before the release (three months before the targeted
freeze, maybe), where we evaluate the state of the upstream desktop and
the customizations done by the other distributions, and decide what to
cherry-pick from them. Doing this constantly might only result in
additional maintenance work as the customizations are getting merged
upstream (hopefully).
> I can be responsible to alert the maintainers of programs with a
> .desktop file entry in administration/preferences to put their program
> in the right place, according do the freedesktop.org spec [3]. This is
> a long time war in gnome, but i think general users are missing
> because of that. Ok, you'll point me to some 9999
> discussions in gnome mailing lists, wikis, blogs ... but ... think
> about debian ... think about their users. (well ... this is my point
> of view).
Right, but at least for the beginning of the lenny release cycle this
war should be fought upstream, and any help you want to provide would be
welcome I guess. If things don't work out upstream as you/we plan, we
can still fix them on our side, see above.
> In a final way, i think several enterprises trust in debian's security
> ans stability. Lets take the step ahead for lenny.
Totally.
cheers,
Michael
Reply to: