[Portland] why not a CLI?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 03 March 2006 10:18, Dan Kegel wrote:
>  There's no reason to wait for the API, though;
>  the CLI apps can be prototyped separately.
>  And I wouldn't be surprised if they were the
>  first tangible result of the portland effort,
>  followed later by the protocol or api approaches.

it's far easier to go wrap command line tools around an interface than to 
start with a command line apps (esp if they are bash scripts ;) and turn them 
into a library.

given the amount of manpower available to work on this, one might want to go 
the more efficient route.

secondly, the nice thing about library APIs is that if the business end of the 
stick is a bunch of command line apps: the app developer doesn't care.

if the library actually does the work using system calls (or whatever): the 
app developer doesn't care.

when the method switches: the app developer doesn't care.
if the methods are different across platforms: the app developer doesn't care.

they just keep using the same library API. they don't have to worry about 
executing external binaries in a safe manner or figuring out where in the 
system they exist or .... since this is being done for app developers, i'd 
say this is a pretty important point.

and this was, iirc, all covered in the meeting at portland (the city).

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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