From owner-freebsd-config Mon Feb 24 20:23:03 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id UAA19985 for config-outgoing; Mon, 24 Feb 1997 20:23:03 -0800 (PST) Received: from time.cdrom.com (root@time.cdrom.com [204.216.27.226]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id UAA19972 for ; Mon, 24 Feb 1997 20:22:53 -0800 (PST) Received: from time.cdrom.com (jkh@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.8.5/8.6.9) with ESMTP id UAA06600; Mon, 24 Feb 1997 20:22:32 -0800 (PST) To: msmith@gsoft.com.au cc: freebsd-config@freebsd.org Subject: Psst! TurboVision? Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 20:22:32 -0800 Message-ID: <6596.856844552@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-freebsd-config@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Did you get a chance to look at this? I've been playing with it for the last 24 hours and I'm *sold*! I was even able to compile all the DOS TurboVision examples from my copy of "Effective Borland C++ examples" - it's pretty slick! Creating menus with this thing is definitely a big win. I'm already diving in to do SOS (Son Of Sysinstall)'s top screens in it, and the interesting varieties of interaction I'm going to be able to do with it *FAR* exceeds what's possible with libdialog. I really like it. Oh yeah, the ALT key also works fine in VTY mode - it's only in an xterm that you can't use it (which means we're still OK for the installation). It would still be nice to make it work with moused, but that comes later (moused's not even enabled in our standard install anyway). I wish we were using itcl as our default base, of course - it'd be a lot easier to maintain their OOP framework through that mechanism than it's going to be in TCL. The only way I see it working now is that we'll write set of C++ derived classes for doing sysinstall-ish stuff and with the kinds of data structures encountered more often in that context, then we write the TCL->C++ goop for interfacing to those classes. I don't see any reason to implement the entire TurboVision API in TCL unless it's for the manifest purpose of providing those components for further extention, and TCL is bad at that (hence the reference to [incr tcl] :-). Ah well! I've committed it as a port under devel, just to make it easier to sync up with it. I really don't see anything better coming down the pike, and there doesn't seem to be a serious groundswell of support for the HTML approach (for which I still admittedly still have reservations myself). I think this is it. This is our CUI. Now we just need to design the back-end. :-) Comments? Jordan