[Desktop13.04-Topic] gnome-control-center

[Jeremy Bicha]

Hi,

We discussed at UDS last time splitting off Ubuntu's customizations of
gnome-control-center into a separate ubuntu-control-center. Are we
going to do that or is it possible to drop quite a few of the Ubuntu
patches and allow for a pretty pure experience without a split?

Problems with the Ubuntu patches
============================
- Ubuntu has 46 patches for gnome-control-center 3.4 in Quantal;
Debian Wheezy has 6.

- An example of the most extreme patching is the Appearance/Background panel.
http://bicha.net/img/system-settings-appearance.png

And this is what GNOME is doing now:
http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.6/figures/users-system-settings-background.png
How are we supposed to merge those two designs and are we dependent on
getting Canonical to redesign this panel now that GNOME has redesigned
theirs? It would make the work a lot easier if the Unity-specific
stuff were moved to a separate panel.

- A second example is the pointless extra icons next to Personal,
Hardware, and System which was done wrong so it's broken if you use
Adwaita or worse, any of the accessibility themes, or almost every
theme really: http://bicha.net/img/system-settings-adwaita.png

- While the specification the Canonical designers created last year to
redesign System Settings was nice, design work for GNOME stuff really
needs to be done in GNOME. Otherwise, it becomes a continual headache
to maintain patches that further diverge from GNOME each cycle. And of
course the Ubuntu GNOME Remix really wants to ship the latest GNOME
without all this heavy patching.

Related questions
==============
Will Ubuntu be taking the GNOME language and printers panels now?

Jeremy