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Date:      Tue, 14 Dec 1999 17:37:14 -0600
From:      Chris Costello <chris@calldei.com>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>
Cc:        Donn Miller <dmmiller@cvzoom.net>, Eric Jones <ejon@colltech.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: sysinstall: is it really at the end of its lifecycle?
Message-ID:  <19991214173714.W868@holly.calldei.com>
In-Reply-To: <2683.945164965@zippy.cdrom.com>
References:  <3855F364.E66EC87B@cvzoom.net> <2683.945164965@zippy.cdrom.com>

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On Tue, Dec 14, 1999, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> That's one of the design precepts of the New System, in fact.  There
> is one common UI abstraction which sysinstall II (hereafter referred
> to as Setup) and the new package system both use.  The generic UI
> front-end API is "bound" at runtime to a back-end implementation
> class, the two currently supported ones being Qt and Turbovision (the
> references implementation for the common UI stuff is all written in
> C++), and everything pops up in the appropriate UI environment from
> that point forward.  Our test code checks for $DISPLAY and does the
> appropriate Qt magic in that case, otherwise it binds in Turbovision.
> In theory, one could even write a back-end class which talked to a
> browser.  Scary. :)

   Is Qt going to be put into the base system in this case?  If
I can wrestle along with figuring out a few little problems with
Qt (ones that I could even somehow more easily solve with
Motif!), then I'll continue to develop my system administration
tool(s) with it.

   Another possible solution I was thinking about (but will
probably really regret) is keeping a binary distribution and
enabling source builds only if a Motif or Lesstif port is
installed.  Yes, this implies that I would write it in Motif.
And yes, I'm also sure that it will meet with much disagreement.

> In order to ensure that the package's installation routines call the
> common UI routines for all their interaction needs (remember the VTY2
> scenario), a package's installation script is also now assumed to be a
> secure TCL script rather than being the arbitrary executable it is
> now.  This has a number of implications even more important than
> simple interface unification, of course, most of them in the realm of
> security.

   So is all of this (TCL, Qt, et. al.) going into the base
system to facilitate this work?

-- 
|Chris Costello <chris@calldei.com>
|A computer scientist is someone who fixes things that aren't broken.
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