GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode
Posted Nov 21, 2012 19:14 UTC (Wed) by
ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
In reply to:
GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode by raven667
Parent article:
GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode
I'm not familiar with the internals of GNOME but what about notifications or IPC or VFS plugins?
IPC and VFS, and settings, are sitting at the GLib level, our lowest common denominator; GLib's API and ABI were not bumped.
a lot of functionality that was in separate libraries was deprecated and moved into GTK+ 3.x and GLib; the symbols are different, and the libraries are still available for applications to use, so you can definitely run a GNOME 2 application in GNOME 3, should you choose to do so. obviously, it would be better to port to non deprecated tech, but it's not mandatory.
let me give you a for instance: Banshee is a GTK+ 2.x (and GNOME 2.x) applications, given that only recently Mono has been updated to support GNOME 3 API; I can use it without an hitch under GNOME 3.4 and 3.6, and all its functionality remains untouched. true, some stuff works better when integrated in GNOME 2's panel - but to be fair, it's all inside extensions that can be removed, and I look forward to the point where Banshee will be a proper GNOME application again.
the core applications in GNOME are tied pretty much with the rest of the environment, because they are designed to be that way; you can avoid using Nautilus, after all, but you cannot complain that Nautilus 3.6 does not work without the rest of its dependencies, because Nautilus is not meant to be a file manager that can work under every desktop environment under the sun - and it certainly isn't up to you to tell the Nautilus maintainers what they have to spend time on.
the whole point of the "GNOME Classic" exercise is to provide a different workflow for some users without shipping a completely separate set of dependencies (which we cannot maintain, and that nobody stepped up to maintain in the past 3 years, even after repeated calls for it).
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