Bug#573865: menus.blacklist faar to long

[Florian Uekermann]

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On 04/25/2011 05:53 PM, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le samedi 23 avril 2011 à 16:36 +0200, Florian Uekermann a écrit : 
>> Please remove at least kate, kopete and k3b from the blacklist. A
>> kde-standard install doesn't install those and at least kate and k3b are
>> not just basic stuff like a viewer or something. Blocking kate is like
>> blocking emacs. It doesn't hurt those few who don't need it and have it
>> installed for some reason to have 1 more entry in 3 sections and it will
>> save a lot of people from getting scared when trying gnome.
> 
> I don’t think k3b is a good example. There is one single application
> used throughout GNOME by everything that needs to burn CDs, it is
> brasero. Allowing k3b in addition is just confusing.
> 
> kopete is even a worse case. For GNOME 3, instant messaging is
> integrated to the core of the desktop (gnome-panel and gnome-shell),
> through the Telepathy framework.
> 
> For kate, I’d say “why not”. It’s very similar to gedit in terms of
> functionality, but text editors are somehow like ice cream flavors and
> you can’t explain people’s preferences.
> 


Kate is the most important one for me and the people I know, since its
not a simple text editor like gedit or kwrite. I'm glad we agree here
that it does not harm anyone to "allow" it. I would be very happy to see
that fixed.


In general I get the feeling that this is not only about getting a clean
menu without too much redundant and useless stuff, but about building
the barrier to use random non-gnome applications in gnome as high as
possible, if there is a chance that they are installed automatically as
recommendation or dependency of something else. Especially if they are
related to competing DEs (example: I noticed that xterm is not
blacklistet, although its featureset is very very basic compared to
anything like gnome-terminal, but konsole is blacklisted).
This is not a bad thing in general, as there are basic things that you
don't want to have twice (eg terminal emulators, network-management,
DE-specific system-settings-applications...)

Don't you think that a real policy based on actual rules might be
appropriate to decide if the use of specific programs should be
prohibited in gnome.
The only thing you could tell someone who barely knows how to install a
package using the package manager, but isn't the kind of person that can
figure out how to find and use alacarte, if he asks:
"I just want to have the apps that are installed in my menu, can't I
have that without doing complicated stuff, which I can't figure out on
my own?"
is:
"Well, its strange... ...but you get that usually, you just have to use
something else than gnome."

I thought thats exactly the kind of user who should use gnome (among
others).

Allowing users to choose the application they like isn't confusing, at
least far less than the current behavior. The other DEs manage parralell
installations well without blacklisting that much and the menus usually
look ok. There is room for improvement, but I think the roadmap I sent
in the last mail is suitable to get things worked out almost perfectly.

If someone really wants to get the 10 (I think it boils down to about
that number in bad scenarios with the rules I mentioned) applications
out of the menu, he can either throw them out using a menu editor or -
and thats another suggestion I want to make - install a package like
gnome-menu-blacklist-kde that would enforce the old policy system wide
by default (It might even be a _suggested_ package of the gnome
metapackages).

Best regards,
Florian

PS.: Kopete notifications work in gnome as well and telepathy isn't a
gnome-only thing; don't expect broken behaviour in gnome just beause a
something is not part of the gnome project. There is some cooperation
between gnome and kde... ...they even organise the desktop summit
together, I feel people aren't that keen on closed ecosystems inside
gnu/(linux) atm.

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