Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Karl DeBisschop]

On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 13:46, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Karl DeBisschop (kdebisschop at alert.infoplease.com) said: 
> > Are there alternatives to alternatives?
> > 
> > While I agree that it has some real shortcomings, there are also
> > shortcomings to having the user-land equivalents be totally divorced
> > from alternatives. There are also shortcomings to having the KDE and
> > Gnome equivalents be divorced from each other and having to set default
> > browsers in both.
> 
> That should be handled by better desktop interoperation, not wrapping
> everything in a forest of symlinks, IMO; take, for example, a unified
> MIME system.

That sort of assumes you are starting with a document of some sort,
right?

It does not extend to setting a system default MTA, for instance, that a
user can choose to override. Or a system wide print system. Although I
suppose there could be extensions...but MTAs and printers handle many
mime types, most of which are also handled by some desktop viewer. So
it's both mime type and context that determines the app that gets
invoked.

Nor does it let me choose a default RDBMS for users to access, whether
it mysql or PostgreSQL, or running a single server with multiple
versions of PostgreSQL installed. There no document attached to that at
all -- just the invocation of the pgsql or mysql shell.

It's becoming clear to me that the lens I see this through is different
than yours. But with respect, I don't see how what you propose is a
complete replacement for alternatives for the set of issues I raised.

Oh well, if there's that much discussion around the point, ita good
guess that not much will change for FC2. So we will look forward to one
implementation for KDE, another for Gnome, another for the system admin,
and another to facilitate PostgreSQL upgrades (assuming that even gets
built in time). That's life I guess, It's no worse than things are now.

Again, thanks for your thought on the matter. Even if we don't come to
the same conclusion, it seemed worth bringing up.

-- 
Karl DeBisschop <kdebisschop at alert.infoplease.com>
Pearson Education/Information Please