console/desktop integration

[Dennis Heuer]

Sorry but kidnaps comment is naive because he just mixes up some grasped information without reflecting what he was writing. Your tip, eventuality, shows that you didn't reflect the article as well. A better tip would have been: http://www.systemstability.com/ccli.html

There is no similarity between eventuality and my approach because "Eventuality is designed to fully leverage on latest-and-greatest technologies in F/LOSS world, particularly D-BUS, Evolution Data Server, and GNotify. " and trying to substitute action-based systems like cron while my approach just wants to make existing console tools communicating about themselves to enable other apps (dialogs, midnight commander, nautilus, vi and other tools that provide a kind of console access) to integrate these tools. The difference is that eventuality relies on predefined "actions" (OO-commandlines) but my article focuses on how to integrate unknown but existing and still used commandline tools.

The more I discuss about the problem the more I see that people do not even want to see the problem because they see things from only their position, their project and their ivory tower. Eventuality, d-bus, gconf etc. are all future solutions not playing well with today's console tools. Console tools would have to support this future vision which means that the developers must do far more than they'd have to for my idea. So, what's the point about "not getting developers to support it". As I wrote, not every tool on earth must support it. And, most apps support "-h,--help" or "-v,--version" or "-u,--usage" in either way today. That not really all (100%) tools support these parameters doesn't mean anything. It's like not all archives support configure/make. However, more than 80% do, and you always find an alternative app using it.

The second possible approach is creating a database like an RDF-based system, as was mentioned at Footnotes.org. This would not be maintained by the developers themselves, pushing the work to the users or maintainers (distributors) who will never catch up if there's not a simple way of producing the db automatically. This is what my approach offers. My approach also offers the documentation of the parameters, not only the app type.

To make that absolutely clear now: My article is not just about future GNOME, it is about those situations where a user MUST find a dynamic solution or is left alone with writing an action or commandline somehow. I'm talking about when the user needs to select a commandline tool that may be registered somehow in a db but not to the extend that the user could just configure the attributes and make it run appropriately. You can try to provide him with an action-based script language or a more complex solution, you can try to support him with a functionally restricted registry, you can base on GNOME-apps only. But, if the user wants to access the console tools on his system, as they are given today and for the next years, what can he do then except starting the terminal? How can he make them work fine with, say, nautilus console (an often formulated wish)? How the user can select these tools from dialogs in an almost HIG-compliant way?

There was another person saying that "generating" the parameter text is complex. No, it isn't. It is the same complex as printing the help message (application --help).

Regards,
Dennis


Am 08.08.2004 20:04:47 schrieb(en) Maciej Katafiasz:
>Dnia 08-08-2004, nie o godzinie 10:36 +0200, Dennis Heuer napisał(a):
>> Sorry, didn't know where to post it.
>> 
>> I've written an article that's in heavy dispute. Some writer told me:
>> I would suggest getting your idea started as a thread on a freedeskop
>> list that is relevant, or a gnome list. Your going to do your idea a
>> disservice if you get too hung up on specific implementation details
>> before the 'right' people get a chance to be sold the importance of
>> addressing the problem raised in the article.
>> So, ok, I try to pronounce my article here:
>> 
>> Console and Desktop Shaking Hands
>> http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/1267/
>
>There is already a project aiming at just this,
>http://eventuality.freedesktop.org , using DBUS. As a side note, what's
>proposed in article, using magic parameters, is pretty naive approach,
>having number of weak points, as knipknap already pointed out in
>comments on gnomedesktop.org (http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?
>thold=-1&mode=nested&order=0&sid=1907)
>
>Cheers,
>Maciej
>
>-- 
>"Tautologizm to coś tautologicznego"
>   Maciej Katafiasz <mnews2 at wp.pl>
>       http://mathrick.blog.pl
>
>
>
>