[Portland] xdg_vfs_gnome command line client

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 31 May 2006 09:08, Dan Kegel wrote:
> On 5/31/06, Jeremy White <jwhite at codeweavers.com> wrote:
> > Whoa.
> >
> > Wait, this all seems like a bad idea to me.
> >
> > The concept of xdg-utils, in my mind at least, is that every function
> > it provides is an abstract desktop environment independent function.
> >
> > The whole *point* of xdg-utils is that I don't want to know
> > the inner details of gnome vfs.
>
> Agreed.  nf2, would it make sense to merge the two to have a common
> commandline interface and accept identical input?  i.e. to make them both
> implement a common "xdg-vfs" command syntax and semantics?  We want to hide
> the differences between desktops, not accentuate them.

i'd take one step further back even and ask: what are the use cases for this?

i'm concerned that we're starting to cross that line between "works just fine 
as a CLI tool since it's a fire-n-forget, usually-at-install-anyways type 
thing anyways" to "used heavily from applications, so really ought to be in a 
library". this tool is cool beans for accessing these things from the command 
line (though we already have similar tools; only diff is they don't do 
stdin/out streaming), but honestly: 

writing correct source code that constructs command lines (doing this safely 
can be a tricky endeavour at times), fork/exec'ing them and then managing 
them via stdin/stdout fd's (esp when parsing output) is not trivial.

the trend has been to take applications like apt and rpm that were for years 
used in such ways and build libraries for them for such uses. this is being 
done not because there is a library fetish out there, but because -it works 
better-. in cases where this hasn't happened yet, such as in the case of 
cdrecord, it causes a lot of headaches for developers (in the case of 
cdrecord its because it's output keeps changing from version to version). we 
should try and avoid recreating past mistakes.

if the use case is "to be used in natively compiled applications" then this 
code should probably be encapsulated into a nice little C library. 
application developers will thank us in the long run and it will likely be an 
easier sell to ISVs.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
Undulate Your Wantonness
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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