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

[Mark]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 12:32 PM, David Jarvie <djarvie at kde.org> wrote:
> On Mon, July 25, 2011 8:08 pm, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> David Jarvie wrote:
>>> On Mon, July 25, 2011 12:50 pm, Ambroz Bizjak wrote:
>>>> Hi Mark,
>>>> have you seen my proposed improvement on your suggestion?
>>>>
>>>> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=131149560119520&w=2
>>>>
>>>> I suggest that you consider it, because it would avoid having to
>>>> update the Freedesktop specification and any DE that doesn't name its
>>>> programs differently in other DEs (e.g. Xfce).
>>>
>>> This proposal has the same drawbacks as Mark's - it is aimed at
>>> knowledgeable users, not the ordinary user who may not be aware of which
>>> desktop a particular application is from. See
>>> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=131159889604990&w=2.
>>
>> So what is *your* proposed solution?
>>
>> As you say, the long term solution is to have setting interoperability.
>> The
>> key words there are "long term". We can't do that *now*, before the new
>> KDE
>> release and before the new GNOME release. We need a solution *now* to
>> avoid
>> having two entries with the exact same name in the application list.
>>
>> Mark and Ambroz's solutions have the advantage of not requiring months of
>> collaboration and programming, which would be needed for setting
>> interoperability.
>
> I don't object to Mark's proposal as a short term solution - it's better
> than having two identically named applications. I'm just concerned that it
> isn't ideal from the ordinary user's perspective, and that it should be
> recognised as being an interim fix.
>
> The longer term aim should of course be to share as many as possible of
> the settings between desktops and therefore make them accessible from both
> Gnome and KDE System Settings applications. KCMs should be categorised
> according to whether or not they contain settings which are not shared
> between desktops, and applications using unshared settings should as a
> matter of policy be expected to provide direct access to the relevant
> KCMs, thus avoiding the need for the user to find and run the 'other'
> System Settings.
>
> --
> David Jarvie.
> KDE developer.
> KAlarm author - http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm
>
>

In my opinion there should be a cross desktop system settings
application where the KDE implementation can use KCM and the gnome
implementation uses whatever they want to use.
That would be the ideal solution imho.