[system-tools] distro / functionality detection

Hi

The GNOME System Tools seem to be very nice tools but I have a concern
and a proposal regarding distro / functionality detection. In short: You
are using the imake approach but I'd welcome an autotools approach if
you know the philosophy behind these two. This has nothing to do with
your build system...

AFAIK g-s-t (and imake) configures itself on startup according to the
distro they are running; g-s-t looks for a file where it can recognize
that it's Debian Woody or Mandrake x.y or RedHat a.b, and then g-s-t
does a lookup of the distro name and version in a table to see which
functionality should provided. Now the problem with this approach is
that forea each distro (version) g-s-t needs to be modified. There are
probably many Debian based distros out there but as long as they don't
tell g-s-t "I am Debian Sarge" or send you a patch, they won't be
recognized.

I for example am co-maintainer of a really tiny distro whose networking
support is ifupdown-based (i.e. Debian Sarge) and whose initscripts
follow the LSB rules; I could just send you a patch to add support for
our distro but that just doesn't make sense as there are thousands of
distros...

What I propose is the feature-based (or autotools) approach. So, instead
checking on startup whether Debian Sarge or Fedora Core 2 is running,
just check for the needed features. I.e. check whether ifupdown manages
the network system by looking for the /etc/networks/interfaces file,
check whether the bootscripts have a chkconfig line the LSB typical
lines in there.

Keep up the great work

PS: Restructured similar to the top-down proposal of Havoc and
"autotooled" I'd love to see the GNOME System Tools in the desktop
release.

-- 
Jürg Billeter <[email protected]>