On 2013-02-10 18:51, Kevin Walzer wrote: > On 2/10/13 1:39 AM, Ian Wadham wrote: >> Should I persevere with Macports_Framework? It's been a while since I >> worked with threads and concurrent processes and Apple's way of doing >> things, in Objective C, OS X and Xcode is all new to me. I enjoy a >> challenge, >> but in this case, is it (Macports_Framework) worth the effort? People >> are >> lukewarm about having a GUI for Macports anyway. I am not, but I find >> the framework for interacting with Macports to be huge and rather >> daunting. > > It's been my observation that as long as MacPort devs have worked on a > GUI, they have tried to do it the hard way--writing it in Cocoa, and > making use of MacPorts internals.
>From the initial design, the Tcl library macports1.0 was always meant to be used by different clients. > A classic Unix design pattern would limit the scope of the project to > writing a user-friendly GUI, leaving MacPorts internals alone, and using > the port tool as the point of contact. The GUI can drive MacPorts via > commands to the port tool, then parse its output for its own purposes. The problem with that is MacPorts never defined a "stable" output format for the port command and I am not sure whether compatibility is something we want to hold us back from changing the output of the port command line interface. Hopefully, I did improve the situation a bit by introducing the -q flag for some of the commands, which was mainly for myself to make it easier to pipe the port output into other tools. > A lot of Cocoa devs (professional ones) mock this approach as simply > wrapping a GUI around a command-line tool. But this approach has the > virtue of simplicity, letting MacPorts do what it does best and letting > the UI concentrate on providing a pleasant user experience. Well, the idea of the MacPorts.framework was to give GUI developers a library interface they could use instead of worrying to implement a screen scraper and parse the output correctly. Rainer _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
