[Desktop13.04-Topic] Default file manager

[Dylan McCall]

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 1:57 AM, Omer Akram <om26er at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> there.. that is the thing that i don't like at all... we need to patch
> nautilus to show a complete menu bar. nautilus (and other gnome apps) with
> just one menu + settings cog isn't really that suits very well to Unity.. As
> file manager is more important than any other [gnome] app we would really
> want our file manager to look like a real app :-)

I agree with you to the extent that Nautilus 3.6 doesn't fit well with
Unity, but this is not localized to Nautilus. This is _almost every
GNOME app going forwards_.  In Quantal that includes (to varying
extents) System Log, Contacts, Empathy, Character Map, Disk Usage
Analyzer, many of the default games, Calculator, Font Viewer,
Screenshot and Disks. The number is going up, not down. Incidentally,
that makes them very much real apps ;) Whether it fits with Unity or
not, that is where the vast majority of core applications in Ubuntu
are heading.

For reference, with today's Unity, you will always have something like this:
http://ubuntuone.com/4fX6ac4X8OeJyy2KSTpkvE (Menu bar that says
"EmpathEmpathy" in Ubuntu 12.10).

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Right, as mentioned in reply to your other email though I think we just
> don't have the resources to play catchup with GNOME that way (or that it's
> not the best use of our efforts) so I would suggest we update to 3.6 and
> resolve the concerns we have with it, we will get 3.8 next cycle then, etc

I'll admit to looking at this from some distance, but that sounds like
a wasteful strategy, and I suspect it would eventually drain more
resources than trying to solve this 'for good'. If you handle
divergence by patching these applications to fit downstream, without
providing any benefit for upstream, these projects will never stop
diverging — and the divergence is way bigger than Nautilus as it is.
Before talking about file managers, people should talk about how Unity
fits with the direction GNOME applications are going. Because that is
the problem: Unity has a very different vision for how applications
should work than the GNOME project, which it depends on for
applications and development tools.

I think there needs to be a detailed plan for how Ubuntu is going to
solve that problem with upstream. Barring that, there needs to be some
consensus around why solving it upstream is unacceptable. Without that
understanding, I think it would be impossible to make an informed
decision on what to do about Nautilus.

Dylan