It's time to jettison CCSM

[Petko]

On 02/11/2012 12:56 PM, Alan Bell wrote:
> On 31/01/12 22:46, Petko wrote:
>>
>> -- change the package description
>>
> sure, but that won't stop anyone
It's just one of those things that add up to changing the status of ccsm.
>>
>> thus far - things to do instead of removing the package that will put 
>> the fire out. Now some additional stuff:
>>
>> -- make CCSM launch MyUnity (hell , keep the checkbox - with the 
>> listed changes we have a Safty-ed (I just made that up) power user 
>> tool , so if someone wants to uncheck it he'll know better next time)
> I don't like to be nasty about code other people have written, but 
> srsly! It is in gambas which is kind of a visual basic thing, it looks 
> a bit like it has multiple pages, but it doesn't, it is one continuous 
> layout pane 3787 px wide with individual controls scattered over it, 
> with manual placement - no packing. there are buttons to go left and 
> right which scroll the huge layout pane left and right. There is no 
> way to get keyboard focus on the left/right controls and you can tab 
> off the currently viewable area into stuff you can't see. 
> Interestingly with orca a user would just think it is one huge page 
> and you can successfully operate controls off-screen, but that isn't 
> really how this stuff is supposed to work (and yes, I do know that 
> compiz is more for visually impaired users than blind users, but I 
> like stuff to work with orca). Adding or removing a setting in unity 
> and wanting to expose that new setting in myunity (like turn on and 
> off the HUD, or the overlay thing that grabs long hold of the super 
> key (I use super+mousewheel for compiz enhanced zoom bindings)) would 
> mean hacking the myunity thing in the gambas IDE and placing 
> individual controls, and wiring them up to gconf calls and then 
> testing. Incidentally there is a *heap* of hard coded "IF 
> Main.distribuzione = "Ubuntu 11.04" THEN " switches to control whether 
> it shells out to gconftool or gsettings. The ccsm tool builds a much 
> more standard gtk interface based on what is in the XML files the 
> plugins provide to describe their available settings. Add a new 
> setting to unity, it turns up in the tool, no hacking the gambas, it 
> is just the architecturally right way to do it.
> What would be fine, is to have a mode for CCSM that *just* exposes the 
> unity plugin. So you can't turn it off, but you can tweak all the 
> things that the unity developers have declared in the XML file as 
> tweakables. This would be almost trivial to do, in fact a nice way to 
> do it might be to add some command line flags to ccsm to allow you to 
> launch it in a way that doesn't allow plugin enabling and disabling, 
> or just expose a fixed list of plugins. Or just expose enabled plugins 
> and don't allow turning them off. It is only really the enabling or 
> disabling process that unity doesn't seem to like, the rest of the 
> time it is pretty solid for me.
I actually wrote the proposal for MyUnity because I thought it's going 
to be an official configuration tool . I didn't know ccsm autogenerates 
the configuration UI from XML  :^) .

I'm going to tweak the blueprint 
(https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ccsm-safeties-p) taking 
into account the new info from you .It'd be best to annotate further 
thoughts there , so we have the ideas clearly listed and easier to develop .

Petko