Hello Guido, On 10/02/2013, at 10:36 PM, Guido Soranzio wrote: > On 10/02/2013, Ian Wadham wrote: >> Maybe there is scope for a simpler interface to Macports, such as >> running scripts and intercepting the output, but I have not looked at >> that. > > You can have a look at the sources of Guigna I published on GitHub: > <https://github.com/gui-dos/Guigna>.
That looks very nice. You have certainly put in a lot of work. > It is at a very early stage of development and it is rather naive: > on the contrary of you, I am no so proficient in multithreading > programming but I think that a "screen scraping" approach is not > that evil. There is no great virtue in multi-threading or multi-processing if you do not have to, IMHO. I cut my teeth on multi-user O/S and real-time, but my rule-of-thumb has always been: "The number of difficulties and bugs goes as the square of the number of threads or processes involved" … :-) Conversely, by keeping processing simple, you get working results sooner. "Screen scraping" is a term that is new to me. What does it mean in Guigna's case? > In my humble opinion, a really useful GUI for MacPorts should address > not only the final users but also the developers and the budding new > committers. It should go far beyond wrapping the basic commands and > instead be capable of launching its own automating scripts, > detecting other package managers and solving the conflicts, > aggregating the latest commits from the Web and comparing > the different versions available from different sources, > connecting to experimental repositories from third parties. I think it might be confusing for end-users to have all of that in one app, but great for developers and system admins. I heartily agree with you that "wrapping basic commands" is not enough. I particularly hate GUIs that wrap basic programming and then pass through base-level error messages ---unedited and out of context. The popup message "Invalid type. OK?" is a classic example (from MSAccess 2000). What type is invalid? In which program? And what data was being accessed? The user/programmer is left to guess. Guigna passes through everything, in context, and that is a valid way to go, IMHO, as long as your target users can understand what they see. All the best with Guigna, Guido. Please keep in touch. A multi repository, multi system GUI for installing FOSS on a Mac is indeed an ambitious undertaking. Go Guido! Cheers, Ian W. _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
