Hey Vincent, On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 3:00 AM, Vincent Untz <[email protected]> wrote: > Le dimanche 06 novembre 2011, à 17:06 +0100, Frederic Peters a écrit : >> + Boxes >> https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointThree/Features/Boxes >> → many commits, mclasen will push the developers to blog a progress report >> once they have something to show > > While Boxes look interesting, to me, it feels like it's "just" an > application, and not a feature per se. And I'm not saying that in a > negative way :-)
Whether Boxes should be part of the feature process is a good question. To be honest, I'm not sure I totally understand the feature process as it stands. I think it is good that we have some reigns on the things that we consider part of the core though and I expect the process will be refined as we go ahead. Boxes is indeed an app. However, it is not just any app. It is one of the special apps that we consider part of the core experience. These are different from third party apps in a number of important ways. Not limited to being: designed by the GNOME design team, designed to work cooperatively with the other core apps, behaviorally and visually consistent with other core apps, generically named, exclusive to the GNOME core (not having an external identity or appearing in any app store or other OS), totally amazing. They are all listed here: https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/ These are by no means the only apps that we'll see appearing for GNOME 3 but they are a special class. We want to take great care in how they are designed and built. They are part of the core GNOME experience. For many of those apps the utility is fairly self evident. I don't suppose we need to make the case very strongly for Calendar being an important core functionality. However, I do agree that Boxes may be a bit more on the edge. There are a few things to keep in mind though. First is that Boxes isn't just about virtualization. It is useful to anyone that has ever needed to use a computer that isn't in front of them physically. That includes virtualized machines both local and remote as well as remote systems in general. If you are on your laptop at home and forgot something on your machine at work - theoretically Boxes can help you out. Another thing to consider is that Boxes being built-in helps people test out new releases of our own systems. If you want to try out or review the latest release of GNOME 3 you don't need to install additional tools to do so. Just click on the link in the release announcement and without much delay you have a Box with ready to try. (sidebar: Windows 8 includes a remote desktop "core app" by default it seems.) I think there is a lot of value in embracing virtualization and remote computing and building it into the core of GNOME in a way that doesn't make the user think about virtualization or remote computing :) > So unless I'm missing something, I wouldn't track that as a 3.4 feature. > We can of course talk about the app when promoting 3.4, though. To be honest, if you leave out core apps from this process I'm not sure what is left is all that interesting. Core apps are the "interesting" parts of the OS. Jon _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
