Date: Sun, 31 Aug 1997 14:34:27 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Conclusion to "NT vs. Unix" debate Message-ID: <5354.873063267@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 31 Aug 1997 22:12:30 %2B0200." <19970831221230.08862@grendel.IAEhv.nl>
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> But I think that the hack-heads who do everything from a tty and > who have a lot of influence on the development of FreeBSD, should > consider the world outside who's in need of GUI's. Hey, we're always willing to evaluate your code. We just don't feel particularly good about folks coming up and saying "hey man, your approach sucks - you need to make this stuff graphical and more consistent" when we already KNOW that there are a great many limitations to the approach we've taken, said limitations almost always a direct result of limited manpower. Let's take sysinstall for example, something which you say has a confusing GUI with a poor selection model. I agree with you. sysinstall's UI is a festering heap of trash which annoys me, its principle author, probably more than anyone. Why is it so evil? Because it uses libdialog(3) and a series of hand-rolled curses(3) screens, the many limitations of those stemming from the general unwieldyness of curses programming and my lack of time to sit down and write a whole bunch of advanced curses widgets like scrolling list boxes or expanding lists. I also noted this MANY times in the various mailing lists and cast my nets far and wide for some better GUI development environment that didn't depend on X (which you can't really do if you're writing an installer for someone who might be installing a rack-mounted PC using a serial line and a VT100 terminal). Until I finally stumbled onto Turbovision 5 months ago, there was nothing, zilch, nada, and all the Windows advocates yelling for better GUIs were absolutely no help at all - all talk and no code from them. Even Turbovision, with all its snazzy CUI objects, is going to be something of a bear to come to grips with and it's a far cry from the kinds of drag-and-drop GUI building tools that the Windows hackers get to use in prototyping their own stuff. There's probably a couple of month's work ahead of us for setup(1) just in getting the GUI tools worked out. But no, everyone conveniently overlooks points like this when they get in the way of a good philosophical debate and I, for one, am getting just a little tired of discussing how nice the destination would look if we just went there when what we should be discussing is how to build the friggin' ROAD so that we CAN get there! :-( Jordan
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