GNOME Shell [LWN.net]

GNOME Shell

Posted Apr 22, 2010 16:05 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: GNOME Shell by jspaleta
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Ubuntu's Indicator Menus

Well I don't think that Gnome has really had that hard and fast rules to what is 'Gnome' or not.

Only so much what is in the default Gnome.

Just because people almost never ship what is in the default Gnome setup. The most common modifications are to use Firefox instead of Epiphany and add on OpenOffice.org, but there are lots of other mods people do. Themes, configuration tools, default configurations of gnome applications.

And I have not seen any Gnome devs complaining about or anything. At least nothing beyond ignoring pathes for PA and breaking it with bad configurations and such, or occasional input into things like the 'Ubuntu Button Placement' drama.

That and they occasionally bring back in mods and add-ons into to the project's default installs. The biggest example is Novell's Gnome C# support and Tomboy.

That and they have support for lots of things that are not part of the default install. Like all the other language bindings besides C, Python, and C#.

So i don't think that Ubuntu is doing anything weird or unusual here. Maybe they could be working closer with upstream, or maybe not. I don't know, but the most important thing that Ubuntu can do is get it done and out there as quickly as possible so that they can get lots of feedback.

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GNOME Shell

Posted Apr 22, 2010 16:12 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

It's one thing to replace default gnome applications with others put to leave the gnome application as optional. Like when firefox replaced epiphany. Does such a switch really impact application developers who are writing to the specifications set down by the gnome project? No.

It's quite another to tell developers point blank that a framework component like the notification area won't be included at all for users to optionally put back on their gnome panel even its its not there by default and they they must adapt to the unilateral decision making of Canonical regardless of what the GNOME project has defined as its development framework.

-jef