Date: Sat, 02 May 1998 07:08:16 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: bjc23@hermes.cam.ac.uk Cc: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, Don Wilde <dwilde1@ibm.net>, Joey Garcia <bear@pacificnet.net>, Malartre <malartre@aei.ca> Subject: Re: A GUI greyscale interface by default / sysinstall II Message-ID: <22910.894118096@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 02 May 1998 14:55:36 BST." <Pine.BSF.3.96.980502144339.241H-100000@bjc23.trin.cam.ac.uk>
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> I forgot to mention that SCO's sysadmsh (and scosh) are written in a sort > of toolkit called oash, but unfortunately, I think it's owned by SCO and > therefore presumably not available. Would it be useful to write something > like this for FreeBSD? (Perhaps slightly different from dialog!) We'd welcome any sort of effort to write a UI toolkit, yes! > I suppose the sophistication of the toolkit you want depends on the > sophistication of the user interface. But the user interface doesn't have > to be very sophisticated to look nice. (sysadmsh isn't very > sophisticated.) No argument there. That's why TurboVision hasn't been exactly eagerly embraced - like I said, it's exceedingly sexy and does anything one could want, but it's just a bit TOO general purpose to be something one can come up to speed on in an afternoon. :) A much more practical UI library would take the approach of giving the programmer some flexibility in laying out internal fields but keep the dialogs all pretty standard. This has the positive effect of also forcing the UI hackers to keep to a consistent L&F, even if it might not always be as general as they'd like, and not confuse the poor users any more than they already are. > Do you want sysinstall II to run as an X application too? (Like scoadmin > on the SCO Open Server.) That would then be harder. The ideal "UI layer", of course, would treat the back-end "scribble on the screen" bits abstractly enough that you could use the same "stick me up a form that looks like this" code for both X and TTY applications, each environment being somehow auto-detected and the appropriate back-end piece loaded in (or you could just take the lazy man's approach and do it at link time, offering several different binaries). People have made the point that a toolkit done properly this way could even be driven around by a web browser since spitting HTML at a browser is just one more variation on the theme. But bear in mind that this is all an ideal and should be purely optional to anyone who actually wishes to implement a solution that we can use within our current lifetimes. :-) > Has anyone seen SCO's sysadmsh/scoadmin or any other similar config > programs? What did you think of them? I actually thought sysadmsh was fairly usable. Simplistic, yes, but it brought a lot of the admin functions under one set of menus so I could find them quickly, and for doing _certain_ kinds of things it was quicker than just doing it at the shell prompt. It also made some really braindead decisions too, of course, and I'd hope that we'd not have to repeat those. :-) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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