Date: Sat, 2 May 1998 15:40:40 +0100 (BST) From: Ben Cohen <bjc23@hermes.cam.ac.uk> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, Don Wilde <dwilde1@ibm.net>, Joey Garcia <bear@pacificnet.net>, Malartre <malartre@aei.ca> Subject: Re: A GUI greyscale interface by default / sysinstall II Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980502150942.241J-100000@bjc23.trin.cam.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <22910.894118096@time.cdrom.com>
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Hi! > > I forgot to mention that SCO's sysadmsh (and scosh) are written in a sort > > of toolkit called oash, but unfortunately, I think it's owned by SCO and > > therefore presumably not available. Would it be useful to write something > > like this for FreeBSD? (Perhaps slightly different from dialog!) > We'd welcome any sort of effort to write a UI toolkit, yes! Is there any sort of standard for UI toolkits? How appropriate are tk or VTCL? > A much more practical > UI library would take the approach of giving the programmer some > flexibility in laying out internal fields but keep the dialogs all > pretty standard. This has the positive effect of also forcing the UI > hackers to keep to a consistent L&F, even if it might not always be as > general as they'd like, and not confuse the poor users any more than > they already are. Something like SCO's oash sounds quite sensible for this. Is there anything similar available that we could use? > The ideal "UI layer", of course, would treat the back-end "scribble on > the screen" bits abstractly enough that you could use the same "stick > me up a form that looks like this" code for both X and TTY > applications, each environment being somehow auto-detected and the > appropriate back-end piece loaded in (or you could just take the lazy > man's approach and do it at link time, offering several different > binaries). That's what SCO's scoadmin does. I think it does it by having one TCL script which runs the appropriate code for the environment. However, the way they did it (or the way their TCL works) means that the TTY version doesn't look as nice. (It's also harder to use than sysadmsh.) > I actually thought sysadmsh was fairly usable. Simplistic, yes, but > it brought a lot of the admin functions under one set of menus so I > could find them quickly, and for doing _certain_ kinds of things it > was quicker than just doing it at the shell prompt. It also made > some really braindead decisions too, of course, and I'd hope that we'd > not have to repeat those. :-) Yes, I agree with that. Do we want sysinstall II to be more complex? It might be nice to have a setting for Novice/Express/Custom (Or novice/intermediate/advanced) all the way through (like sysinstall for installing FreeBSD) so that only the important things are available for novice use, more for Express and everything for custom. Ben. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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