Re: [gentoo-desktop-research] test

Tiemo Kieft <blubber@g.o> said:

> Works fine :)
>
> As I already said in #gentoo-desktop I am currently creating a set of
> graphical configuration tools for gentoo. I started this project long
> before I heard of the Desktop/research project, but I think it fits in
> fine. So I'll give a short description of it, and maybe you can give me
> some input.
> Well the primary goal is the make a couple of GUI tools to administrate
> Gentoo Linux boxes. The tools I had in mind are
> - A runlevel editor, which is already in a working state.
> - Portage manager, which enables a users to control the settings in his
> /etc/make.conf. It has builtin use var browser, and mirrorselet.
> - User editor, to manage user accounts on a system
> - GUI frontend to ebuild.
>
> Currently only the runlevel editor is working. You can take a look at
> the project page at http://gct.sf.net, and you can take a look at
> screenshot: http://blubber.student.utwente.nl/~blubber/gct.png
>
> Well, let me now what you think :)

I think it's a good work, but that needs to be more integrated. The main
problem of config tools is that they are most of the time "one shot" programs,
that have one User Interface, works for one version, and is built from scratch
(even using GUI toolkits).

I propose that config tools relies on libconf, which provide powerfull feature
to change config datas, respect software version (behave differently for samba
2 and samba 3), permits data validation (make sure an IP field is valid...) and
- maybe the most interesting- provides UI widget corresponding to the best way
to represent some information. For exemple, for the brwsable property of a
samba share, because it can only be yes or no, libconf will give you a
checkbox. For the 'remote announce' field of the smb.conf file, it's a list of
IP or mask informations. libconf will provide a complete widget presenting a
list of entries that can be added, modified, deleted, and that will only accept
data conforming to the IP/MASK type.

libconf can do other usefull things. A config tools based on libconf benefits
of the ease of use of config files interaction, GUI generation, data
validation, and config information. libconf is also distro independant
(although configuration for other distro is not available for now). So that
your config tools should be portable without any effort.

Now the drawbacks :)
- It's only pure perl for now, I need to develop python and C connection.
- data validation is long to write for config tools with enormous different
fields like samba.
- It only provide gtk2 widget for perl-gtk (but the C or python connection
should not difficult to do)
- The console GUI should be done using cursed-Gtk, but it's still been tested.


-- 
dams

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