Il giorno mar, 20/03/2007 alle 17.58 -0400, Thomas Fitzsimmons ha
scritto:
> Mario Torre wrote:
> > Hello!
> > 
> > I've added some stuff in it. Above all it is now a command line tool,
> > with a gui option (that need some love, but it is usable).
> > 
> > Only for today, the name of the tool is "tap". Suggestion for a name
> > welcomed!
> 
> I'm a little hesitant to add this tool as a full top-level binary, 
> because it will only be used by non-KDE and non-Gnome desktop users. 
> That said, I can't think of a better way to provide this functionality, 
> so I guess I can't object.

Yeah, I think that too, even if my original idea was to expand this tool
to cover other aspects of the configuration, not only the desktop api
(and import/export of preferences for backup).

For example, we could get the XML factory class name, instead of
querying
/META-INF/services/javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory, by querying
a runtime preference. This could revert to a fine default if no
preferences are stored. The benefits here are that users and packages
can configure classpath without recompiling/repackaging, and in a
permanent but flexible way (as opposed to defining a system properties
that have to be done every time).

Note that the tool is used to let the users to configure these settings,
not to retrieve the settings at runtime (for that we will use the
standard preferences api)

Anyway, I'm convinced too that it is too soon to talk about that (I'm
still thinking about it, and I'm not really sure of all the side effects
etc...).

> The binary needs a more descriptive name though.  Anything with 
> "classpath" in the name could be confused with a CLASSPATH manipulation 
> script.  Any suggestions?

Yeah, true... In my tree I have it named just gsetuptool, but this name
does not convince me either... I'm really bad at finding names, sorry.

> Also, maybe there should be a configure option to disable this, for 
> distributions that do choose a preferred desktop (most distros); 
> otherwise users may think they should configure classpath using this 
> binary, rather than relying on auto-detection/their desktop's 
> configuration tool.

True, but notice that the autodetection works based on the desktop the
user is running, and not the default desktop the distro chooses. This is
important, because if I want to run, say, on Fedora, an xfce session,
the application will not work if the requested command is not found in
the preferences (or given as a property). So disabling it will prevent
other users to access easily the values needed to change this behaviour
(though one can use gconftool-2 or edit by hand the content of
~/.classpath/path_to_prefereces.xml) [1].

Said that, I guess the best would be to put this into the examples
directory, and putting all these configuration files into a
README.configurations for example, so that even if the tool is not
enabled, users know where to look.

> Tom

Thanks for the comments!

Ciao,
Mario

[1] Btw, we have done a better job than Sun here already, because we
support more operations, KDE support out of the box all the operations,
Gnome misses only the print tool, while every other desktop is
configurable, and we could use this API even from the command line in an
headless environment if we would!
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