(btw, I got a bounce message on your email address) > I agree with that. But there isn't any reason that this couldn't be > accomplished with a gtk-based interface. of course... > And there are some merits to > using a widget set that more resembles modern computing interfaces, so [n]curses, slang, etc are not "modern" and standard? there's definitely a place for a gtk-based UI, and it's on the cdebconf TODO list, but doing gtk on console/fb doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense IMO. > From what I gather today after playing around with gtk-fb today is > that you would have to have the appropriate versions of several libraries > available- the gtk & gdk libs, compiled for frame buffer support, > glib, the pango libs, and the freetype libs. > That's a little overhead, yes, but I do think that since gtk-fb's a *little*? the gtk libs (the X ones, at least) adds up to about 2Mb. That's bigger than the size of cdebconf, udpkg, anna, and their support libs combined. > motivation is for embedded devices that it would be adequate for our > purposes. From first glance at looking at the new debian installer, > it looks like size is becoming less of an issue, since the appropriate > modules (udebs) can be retreived while the installer is running. At > first glance, it seems feasible to me. If you are proposing that, for broadband/CD-ROM based installs, that we give the option of an X-based install where we use GTK+-type libraries for a UI, that's perfectly reasonable, and quite doable in the cdebconf framework. But if you look at the design, the udebs and cdebconf are mostly aimed at bootstrapping -- this falls under the portion of stuff you might, for example, put onto a floppy to get your install going so that you can pull the rest of things in through the network on a CD-ROM. Heck, as Joey puts it, this base system might not even have a shell.... > The way I see it, the benefit of using this approach over something > like bogl (sorry, I've haven't seen this yet), is that it provides a > complete set of widgets that we can work with to produce a very bogl has a decent set of widgets... afaik it's one of the precursors of microwindows. Actually in boot-floppies (potato) there's even some wrappers to let it work in a pluggable fashion with dbootstrap. > good. I don't think it would be wise to scrap the bogl efforts and > move towards something else, but what I'm asking is if it is feasible > to move the UI that bogl implements over to use gtk-ui, as opposed to > the lightweight, from scratch interface that is there already? i don't want to sound very negative, but i really don't see the point of gtk-fb. gtk on X sounds reasonable, and I'd welcome anyone who'd be interested in writing a gtk UI module for cdebconf. randolph -- Debian Developer <tausq@debian.org> http://www.TauSq.org/
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