Formal complaint concerning the use of the name "System Settings" by GNOME

[Emmanuele Bassi]

hi;

On 24 July 2011 10:00, Ben Cooksley <bcooksley at kde.org> wrote:
>> the short-term fix is to make the KDE system settings OnlyShowIn=KDE,
>> so that users running KDE will not have any issue, and every other
>> desktop will correctly not show the KDE system settings shell.
>
> Wrong. Emmanuele, read my initial email to see why that is not an
> acceptable solution under any circumstances.
> It has to be shown in some form, regardless of the name, under all
> desktop environments.

this is utterly ridiculous.

you're saying that anyone using a KDE application should also install
the KDE system settings shell because it is the only way to configure
KDE *applications*? Qt, like GTK+ uses the same XSETTINGS protocol, to
allow interoperability between toolkits on the same environment --
that's what we use to bridge stuff like the icon theme, the
application font name, and other settings shared across desktops.

this is no more a simple matter of user-facing names: your position is
that only the KDE system settings can change those settings; this is
factually wrong, and ignores what's been done in the past 10 years to
allow interoperability between toolkits and environments.

if we want to add new shared XSETTINGS key we can definitely talk
about that; forcing the hand of users and saying that you require KDE
system settings, and the half of KDE they string along, to configure a
KDE application is not an acceptable solution in any scenario --
unless you start making every single KDE application strictly depend
on the KDE system settings package.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/