Originally Posted by
jbicha
I agree with several of the more recent comments: it's much wiser to improve gnome-panel than to try to keep GNOME 2 alive.
Clement, I understand you are trying to please your users but porting the Mint Menu as either a GNOME Shell extension or a gnome-panel 3 compatible applet is actually going to be less headache, take less time, and be more sustainable than teaming up with one guy who's trying to do the impossible. Clement, I don't think you have the extra time and development energy to implement the co-installable GNOME 2 idea.
Here's the current status of gnome-panel as I see it. Very few GNOME developers actually use gnome-panel as their primary desktop (in fact I don't know of any). gnome-panel is still part of GNOME Core and is the official fallback environment. However, only minimal maintenance is being done on it so it continues to work but it's not really getting any improvements. At some unspecified time in the future, several GNOME developers would like to drop gnome-panel from GNOME Core. Additionally, I believe the GNOME developers would be very appreciate of any patches that improve the way gnome-panel works, especially as they don't have the time (or interest, honestly) in doing that work themselves but are happy to take volunteer contributions.
Huge benefits of contributing to gnome-panel upstream: Already existing code hosting, wiki, bugtracker, release schedule, Google juice, and distro inclusion (every distro already packages GNOME's gnome-panel). Official status instead of trying to gain acceptance for an obsolete and incompatible fork. Each applet that you port to
gnome-panel 3 has a good chance of being picked up by distros and you're probably not the only guy that's trying to get applets ported but good luck trying to convince distros to package your GNOME 2 thing. Here's a big one: if gnome-panel is being actively maintained then GNOME will not kill it, at the most it will drop from being GNOME Core to being community maintained.
Or you could try to keep the entirety of GNOME 2 around but GNOME has already killed it (in the same way that no one is going to bother keeping GNOME 3.2 alive once GNOME 3.4 is out). And GNOME 2 will look less and less appealing with time. What if users want to use the nicer looking gnome-control-center 3? Do you really plan to port all of the new chat protocols to Empathy 2? I hear Evolution 3 is quite a bit nicer than Evolution 2 was. Here's a hint for you: Generally speaking, you can't mix and match GNOME components that are different versions and still be happy....
Bookmarks