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Date:      Wed, 17 Sep 2003 21:23:00 +0000
From:      Michal Pasternak <michal@pasternak.w.lub.pl>
To:        Vulpes Velox <kitbsdlist2@HotPOP.com>
Cc:        Mikel@ocsny.com
Subject:   Re: Desktop FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <20030917212259.GA12266@pasternak.w.lub.pl>
In-Reply-To: <20030917160654.52ceb56c.kitbsdlist2@HotPOP.com>
References:  <20030917160654.52ceb56c.kitbsdlist2@HotPOP.com>

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Vulpes Velox [Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 04:06:54PM -0500]:
> Should this possibly be moved to another list and if so which one?

freebsd-chat@ ?

> 2: Using some light WM as a defualt, but using custamized menus and the like for
> defualt. Possibly setting it up so it comes with predefined configs for various
> WMs.

Have you seen how Debian handles this issue?

Debian packages, which are suitable for placing in such GUI menu, install
specific description files, from which the menus are generated by
update-menus package. Update-menus handles those descriptions and produces
specific configuration file for every installed windowmanager.

Just port it from Debian... and tell ports maintainers to update their
files. You need to have such "update-menu" description file - and you need
to know, which package is a windowmanager, to also generate configuration
for it.

Without correct infrastructure it won't work out. Currently, FreeBSD ports
(and packages) don't provide such meta-information.

> 4: Nice X front end to various cli package tools.

I'd split such task - I mean "GUI configuration tool" - into 2 parts.

One part would be the server. It would be running on local machine,
listening on local socket (or tcp/ip), performing authentication and
specific tasks. Server configuration would be written as an XML file and
parsed into application-specific entries in /etc and /usr/local/etc.

2nd part would be the GUI. You could write then any GUI configuration
tool you want (ncurses, GTK, Qt, KDE) and administer your machine locally -
or remotely. If you use GTK or wxWindows to write such client, you could
even have a GUI configuration tool to run in MS Windows. You could also make
some PHP frontends and create a web-configuration tool.

Python seems a correct language to code such task in. Network infrastructure
would be powered by Twisted Python (www.twistedmatrix.com), GUI would be
done via py-gtk2.

Just my $.25

Regards,
-- 
Michal Pasternak :: http://pasternak.w.lub.pl
Noise to meet you.



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