Re: Control Panel
Havoc Pennington wrote:
>[I'm not on this list so please CC me any replies]
>On 19 Mar 1999, Robert Woodcock wrote:
>> Hmmm, looks like we're not gonna have much trouble coming up with the
>> front-end - we already have two, one for tcl/tk and now one for gnome :)
>>
>> What we need is a good backend. Something that coordinates with the
>> packages to actually get the configuration data changed and have the program
>> use it.
>>
>
>In the interests of "Gnome integration" I'll toss in a couple of comments:
>
>1) The Right Way (tm) for this to work in Gnome is to write applets for
>the Gnome Control Center. There's no need to write a control panel
>application from scratch.
>
>2) Gnome is looking to replace the current Gnome config file parser with
>something more flexible (which allows LDAP, etc.) - there is room to work
>on a common library here that all Gnome apps would automatically use.
>
>OK that's it. I don't have time to work on this, I just wanted to make you
>aware of the Gnome-related issues, in case anyone is interested in working
>on a Gnome frontend.
Gnome integration is fine - for a frontend.
The backend shouldn't be tied to any particular interface. It should
probably be able to fit in the base system, and there should be a simple
frontend that programs can use from maintainer scripts.
If the Gnome Control Center can be made to manipulate whatever database
format we come up with (looks like it's gonna be a bind8-ish format if
noone can shoot too many holes in Wichert's proposal), and talk to the
backend on as many computers as needed (for config updates on an entire
network of machines for example) then it would be a good base to start
with. You can read about the communications scheme in Wichert's proposal
(that document covers the whole enchilada -
http://www.debian.org/~wakkerma/design5.txt)
Frontends should be available for everything - libraries, shell scripts,
ttys, X, fbcon, win32, macos, java, web servers and therefore browsers...
Even if noone wants to code such things right away we should still make it
possible by not going overboard with integration with desktop environments.
I'm urging everyone to be concerned about the data - not the implementation.
You can change around the implementation all you want, rewrite it in
whatever language suits you, etc etc etc, but if it won't talk to the rest
of the implementations, it's worthless.
--
Robert Woodcock - rcw@debian.org
"I never knew manipulating the masses was so easy." -jt
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