On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 02:50:54PM -0700, Gerard Beekmans wrote: > Thomas Pegg wrote: > >I'm starting to lean towards C as the language, at the very least for > >server/daemon side of things anyway. > > What about the client part?
I would suggest a scripting language for the client part, if C is choosen for the server (assuming that we have a smart server and a dumb client). This way people can write their clients in C/Readline, Tcl/Tk, Python/GTK+ or whatever they want to see on their screens. But if the client is supposed to do something more complex than drawing menus and sending messages like (build and install binutils, gcc, coreutils, ...), then C should also be used for it. I would recommend dumb clients, since it allows stricter separation of the user interface and actual building process (this way user interfaces become separate programs). Of course the client needs to know the names of available packages and so on, but this information can come from the server (recommended, since the server best knows on which machine it is running) or from a local database, or whatever. What comes to the XML or NO discussion, I would suggest parsing the commands from the book (if, and only if this is possible cleanly and without hassle). I do not recommend XML since it is clumsy for humans to read and write. Shell scripts with M4 marcos is also an alternative (then we would have conditional execution, et al, without doing anything ourself). Autoconf has already succesfully choosen this approach (and for not so different task). Also I think that users should be free from XML which means that they should only need to edit easy configuration files (name=value), but preferably users can be presented with something like Linux's menuconfig (if it is appropriate for the choosen UI). Well, these are just some random thoughts. I once used Debian's aptitude to upgrade a whole system. It was just few key presses and everything got downloaded and installed and it even asked configuration questions the way I wanted it to. If I once have an LFS system that can be upgraded so easily (without leaving stale files and other problems behind), I'm very happy. -- Tapio -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/alfs-discuss FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
