On Wed, 2002-07-10 at 20:43, Ben Reser wrote: > But a lot > of systems that don't have even the XServer installed but do have have > Xlibs and the mandrake config tools (think servers) would have to have > qt installed in order to get the mandrake config tools. If anyone can > tell me with a straight face that server people should have to install > qt3 to use diskdrake or drakxservices. Or for that matter since some of > these drak tools are used by the installer that qt3 should have to be on > the installer's ram disk. We hear people complain all the time about > how much ram the installer takes and that it takes more RAM to install > than to run a minimal system. Making the drak tools qt3 based rather > than gtk would only make this worse.
I don't fret over this the same way I don't lose sleep because some guy with a 386/SX16 and 4MB of RAM can't get minimal Mandrake installed (for at least two reasons). Or a 286, or an 8088, or.... > The solution to this is simple. Put the functionality of the tools in a > perl module (I think this is already done in some cases). Then just > install the front ends that use those modules. So you would have > perl-MDK-DiskDrake which would include the code that did all the actual > work. And then kdiskdrake and gdiskdrake for the qt and gtk front end > respectively. Then those front ends could use alternatives to map one > of them to diskdrake. This I wholeheartedly agree with. It agrees with the spririt of *nix. Small, light, specific tools that can be used with others to achieve desired results. Many of these tools already have console interfaces. Mousedrake, harddrake, urpmi, etc. If a toolkit has to be installed for drooly-pointy-clicky anyway, then what difference does it make which one? Because of a small difference in size of the toolkits? I will be glad to tell you with a straight face your argument is weak. We are not talking about 10MB HDDs here, or 640KB/RAM. A point has to be chosen below which isn't worried about. Mdk has already decided that 586 is it, for instance. Should they then be worried about a couple of MB toolkit size for GUI tools? No. -- Brad Felmey
