From owner-freebsd-advocacy Sat May 2 06:42:02 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id GAA22679 for freebsd-advocacy-outgoing; Sat, 2 May 1998 06:42:02 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from time.cdrom.com (root@time.cdrom.com [204.216.27.226]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id GAA22648 for ; Sat, 2 May 1998 06:41:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@time.cdrom.com) Received: from time.cdrom.com (jkh@localhost.cdrom.com [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id GAA22647; Sat, 2 May 1998 06:41:20 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@time.cdrom.com) To: bjc23@hermes.cam.ac.uk cc: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, Don Wilde , Joey Garcia , Malartre Subject: Re: A GUI greyscale interface by default In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 02 May 1998 13:40:18 BST." Date: Sat, 02 May 1998 06:41:20 -0700 Message-ID: <22642.894116480@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > version] I am not personally keen on the dialog interface---I prefer the I don't know of any who are... But when it's all you have. :) > The source for /stand/sysinstall says that the next version will be a > complete rewrite. What is/will the interface be like for the new version? We have no idea. :-) One of the major reasons why the next version is about 2 years late now is the fact that no reasonable UI libraries for doing everything we need to do in a reasonably non-complex way currently exist. On the complex side there's TurboVision, very sexy and featureful but also requiring one to write in C++ and understand its somewhat arcane class library, and on the simple side we have plain ncurses(3) which is easy to use but also an unhelpful pain in the butt for implementing all the various text object and menu frobs you'd need for sysinstall II. Everyone's truly keen to see this all happen, I think they really are, we just need a better set of base tools to work with. If this were a commercial software project, I'd also just go shopping at this point and see what nifty tools I could buy. Since we're not, I can't. :-( Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message