Date: Sat, 2 May 1998 14:55:36 +0100 (BST) From: Ben Cohen <bjc23@hermes.cam.ac.uk> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> 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: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980502144339.241H-100000@bjc23.trin.cam.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <22642.894116480@time.cdrom.com>
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Hi! > > 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. :-( 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!) 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.) Do you want sysinstall II to run as an X application too? (Like scoadmin on the SCO Open Server.) That would then be harder. Has anyone seen SCO's sysadmsh/scoadmin or any other similar config programs? What did you think of them? Thanks. Ben. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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