Re: [gentoo-dev] Unified tool for Gentoo specific tasks?

[Robin H.Johnson]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 11:03:14PM +0800, Michael Kohl wrote:
> > As for the programming part, in my opinion shell scripts with use of
> > "dialog" for the GUI are a good option.
> Afer looking at ufed's code I realised that it also uses dialog. But
> it's written in Perl. And actually I think that giving the possibility
> to write a plug-in for "Emergency" in a variety of languages makes it
> more attractive. But still, nothing against the use of dialog (or
> Xdialog[1] for a GTK version of "Emergency").
In doing the cleanup work on ufed to get rid of the much reported bugs,
myself and another developer found just how limiting dialog is.

It would be wonderful if it easily supported multi-modal inputs and
other non-binary options, but they are literally a nightmare.

If you say it can be done, look at the kernel, I suggest you go and look
at the copy of dialog that ships with the kernel. It is a really nasty
bit of hacked up code, completely non-extendable.

For the future UFED, we full-well realized that it would be best as a
core library that has no UI functionality of it's own, and then each UI
is written to just use the library. The (n)curses library that a new
text mode UI would have needs to have a LOT more features than dialog to
be seriously useful. Something like Turbo Vision (the interface style of
the original Borland/Turbo Pascal/C, but in Perl or Python would go a
long way towards what we would like. Turbo Vision was wonderfully
extensible for what it was.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
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