This is the "ideas" web page for the GnomePanelEnhancements project. This project has been accepted as part of Google's [http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html Summer of Code] program ; the student is ManuCornet.

This project was at first a bounty, described [http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/GnomePanelEnhancements here].

All my patches are available here :

http://www.manucornet.net/GNOME/code/already_pushed_patches/

The "Add to panel" dialog

Purpose

The "Add to panel" is not very handy : one sometimes needs to scroll down a long list of applets to get what he wants. The idea would be to make it "two-dimensionnal", with a few categories, and applets in them.

Here's what the "Add to Panel" dialog looked like until now (sorry for the French entries):

http://www.manucornet.net/GNOME/Add_to_panel_before.png

Coding

All right, that was a hard one, but it's now finished.

The new dialog (now available in Breezy) has the following features :

• Applets are listed on a 2D canvas.
• The dialog is designed to be easy to use in lower resolutions, down to 800x600.
• A search bar has been added ; displayed applets are updated in real time while you type.
• The selected applet's description appears below the applet list.
• You can navigate in the canvas with the keyboard (even in search more, when most applets are hidden).
• You can add an applet by dragging-and-dropping it, or juste double-clicking it.
• All the common applets have been patched to have a category.
• This new dialog uses less space, displaying more applets in a smaller window.

So here's how it looks right now :

http://www.manucornet.net/GNOME/Current.png

And two more captures to show how the display is updated "as you type" :

http://www.manucornet.net/GNOME/Current_2.png http://www.manucornet.net/GNOME/Current_3.png

Nice idea, but a major thing that needs to be merged is the custom application launcher/launcher thing. What about integrating the gnome-app chooser thing? CoreyBurger

GNOME menus and sudo

Purpose

The idea here would be to know, for each menu item, whether the user needs to be sudoer (eg Synaptic) or not. If it does and the user is not sudoer, then this item does not need to be shown in the menu.

Coding

Desktop entries that need root privileges should have a "X-GNOME-RootRequired=yes" field in the desktop entry spec (other values for this field can be "no" and "optional", although only the "yes" value actually means something for now). Further discussions will decide how to actually add this to the specs.

Quick and efficient solution for Breezy

I have already coded a quick and easy solution for Ubuntu : since all the sudoers are in the "adm" group, the program only needs to check whether the user belongs to this group. However, this will only work with Ubuntu (but is retro-compatible for breezy, hoary, warty, and previous versions).

More general, but harder, solution

The process needs to be setuid root. It could simply lookup the /etc/sudoers file, but its syntax can be very complex, and I would probably need to import a large part of the code from "sudo", which is also very long and complex.

I have contacted the people from sudo, asking them if I could add for them a function to sudo, letting us use (for instance) the -t option (for "test") like this :

$ sudo -t command user is allowed to run command

They answered that this already existed (-l option, followed by a command name), but it requires the user to type his password (which is out of the question for us), unless the sudoers file has a line like "Defaults listpw=never".

So, here's the best solution I see : make a helper, based on sudo's code, but set the "listpw" variable to "never", and call this helper (which doesn't seem to need to be setuid root, that's good news) each time a .desktop file has a "RootRequired=yes" field. This would provide a very good precision, since a menu item would appear if and only if the user can run this particular command.

Other "minor" things that will be done, look & feel

I call them "minor" because they will probably need a very reasonnable amount of coding and time (although one can never be sure :)), as opposed, for example, to the "Add to panel" enhancement. I will also probably do a little graphics to create (or enhance) a few icons/menus/panel elements.

Use of non-menu-like colours on the panel

Menu clarity and look

Not much coding, here, but a few things would need to be redesigned a little.

Pop-up balloon ?

A Windows XP-like pop-up balloon to indicate to new users where to find things (eg Applications menu).