On Tue 25 Mar 2003 03:05, Guillaume Rousse posted as excerpted below: > Ainsi parlait eddie : > > <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> > > <html> > > Please use standard text for email.
No kidding! > > Then you should talk to Texstar @ Pclinuxonline. He had a great system > > with apt-get and Synaptic that worked with a Gui and worked wonderful, > > although he doesn't have the time to maintain two update mirrors. If > > one guy can maintain a program like that, why can't Mandrake?<br> > > Nobody told this wasn't possible. Just that isn't a priority. Developping > GUI is heavy and costly, especially compared to adding a switch in CLI. If > you want advanced options, you're supposed to be an advanced user, meaning > able to read the doc and a shell prompt... What I'd like to see is a solution I've seen elsewhere.. 1) After adding any usual GUI-ified options as thought appropriate, have a text box (or a page of text boxes for a multi-function app that calls multiple other tools and/or calls a single tool in multiple contexts) where the user can add additional command line switches and params as so desired. The only support needed is to provide the text boxes, one per context, and ensure that their contents gets passed when the specified tool is called within that specified context. One example of the above that I've been working with lately is K3B, the KDE CD/DVD image burning software front-end to the various ripping/burning/isofs tools. In it's prefs dialog, it has an entire page/tab listing the various back end tools, with a text box beside each, in which you can add advanced switches as appropriate. Those that don't know about the additional switches and/or don't want/need to bother with them (like me, for the most part) can just leave them blank, but the several of the back end tools it invokes have all sorts of corner-case command line options unneeded by most folks, and having those text boxes, for additional switches to be added at invocation, means a lot of folks can use the GUI, that would otherwise have to use the command line, or a different front end that provided such options. 2) A (perhaps optional) popup, that lists the progress details and any errors, as the process progresses. One of the big reasons (besides the lack of advanced options in the GUI) I use URPMI rather than the various GUI utils, is that the command line version lists the stuff as it downloads, and I can see where something stalls, if it does. When I'm updating multiple source lists, and I see the internet activity stop for to long a time, without returning a success or failure dialog, on the graphical tools, I have no way of knowing where the hold-up is. With the command line, I can immediately see what mirror isn't responding, or whatever other problem may be occuring. In addition, I like seeing the scrolling status, as the individual components are d/led. A popup window with the same info scrolled in its display on the GUI version would be very nice... An example of this is what KPackage does, when installing an RPM. It pops up a status window, with the various commands and results as they would normally be output on the command line, if one were to invoke rpm from there. Now, in KPackage, it isn't normally such a big deal, because the process isn't so long, with so many steps, as a multi-mirror update, and then an urpmi --auto-select is, but giving GURPMI or Software Installer or whatever the graphical title of the month is now, the same sort of update progress window, would be very useful. (The optional part of it could be handled with a simple checkbox, either as a global option in some settings dialog, or on a per-task basis, right before clicking the "go" button.) Of course, doing it all in a nicely scrolling Konsole window works fine for me, here, but if we are going to have a GUI, we might as well make it a decently functional one, usable by power users as well as newbies, and continuing to support new back-end options, even without new versions of the GUI every time the back-end changes. -- Duncan "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
