So it used to be (back in the day), that you would start an application, it would read some configuration, and you would be done. The application would pretty much be self contained, and so would its configuration (none of this windows registry nonsense). Heck, you could even read the configuration with a text editor and make useful changes without devoting time and effort to knowing all of the pieces of an entire stack that keeps changing over time.
These days we have many bits and pieces that are needed just to get my rhythmbox application to run. Tonight’s irritation was caused by gnome-settings-daemon, which seems to have been designed with only local desktop/laptop users in mind, or at least completely fails to handle NFS shares that have gone away. A bit of digging determined the problem, but debugging this is beyond most users. Most users, who start to find applications won’t run or buttons won’t do stuff will just assume the world has imploded and do the windows thing, rebooting their computers. I would love it if we would have either fewer of these random components or a lot more collective knowledge about their design and interaction (documentation, less frequently changing core pieces, whatever). That way, Google wouldn’t lead me only to pages from clueless users having the same problem telling each other to reboot their Linux computers. This is a problem. It is not a good future when everything is so tenuous that users have to reboot their computers to make things work right again.
Jon.
> “gnome-settings-daemon, which seems to have been designed with only local desktop/laptop users in mind, or at least completely fails to handle NFS shares that have gone away. A bit of digging determined the problem, but debugging this is beyond most users.”
It could be argued that those users that can’t debug will be running Gnome on a local desktop/laptop anyway, without any NFS share.
Did you get the bug fixed?
However, I can’t follow you on the « applications should be self contained ». If things were still done this way, a desktop environment would only be a collection of random bits. I love that it all feels integrated. I love that I can right-click on a song in Rhythmbox to send it to a contact via email or IM. I love that I can right-click on a contact in Empathy to start a desktop sharing session. Etc…
In a consistent desktop environment, applications need to have knowledge of each other, and be at least loosely coupled.
But yeah, handling properly NFS shares is certainly something worth doing as well, I just find it completely orthogonal to the self-containedness of applications.
+1 bochecha. configuration centralization *does* bring benefits.
for instance, without a common database of media players in dbus (used to be hal), you couldn’t just plug in any old media player, have Rhythmbox recognize it, and be able to transfer tracks to it in a format it’s known to support.