Re: Scriptability: To waht degree is this critical?

["Dan Kaminsky" <effugas best com>]

[This post never made it trhough the maildaemon.]


-----Original Message-----
From: Bowie Poag <bjp@primenet.com>
To: Dan Kaminsky <effugas@best.com>
Cc: gnome-gui-list@gnome.org <gnome-gui-list@gnome.org>
Date: Thursday, July 30, 1998 6:32 PM
Subject: Re: Scriptability: To what degree is this critical?


>
>
>On Thu, 30 Jul 1998, Dan Kaminsky wrote:
>
>> Here I am, in the middle of pounding out Yet Another GNOME post(yes my
>> volume has gone down, I have a life too :-) when lo and behold, a real
>> question hits me.
>>
>> Scriptability.
>>
>> The GIMP exposes almost(?) all of its functions to other programs.  This
>> singlehandedly convinced me that I needed to upgrade to Linux, for the
GIMP.
>> In fact, if it wasn't for this I'd have never become interested enough in
>> any of this stuff to join GNOME GUI.
>>
>
>
>IMHO, Scriptability goes beyond the scope of the UISG. Its more or less a
>specific, programmer-centric problem that they must address amongst
>themselves, when it comes to stanadards. Not us, or the Guide. We cant
>touch that, even if we wanted to.
>
>Bowie


The purpose of the style guide is to define what methods the user should be
able to use in order to interact with a GNOME-compliant application.

As such, it is directly within our purview to decide whether it should be
*suggested* that fully complaint applications possess some form of
scriptability.  If we were to ask that all GNOME apps had a command line
mode, ignoring whether or not they should, I don't think you could say that
we couldn't ask that.  A command line interface is a method by which a user
interacts with the application.  Incidentally, CLI's are very easily
scriptable, compared to Windows or even most GUI apps.

It being said that the user doesn't always want to have to interact with the
GUI in realtime, and with the above justification for CLI requestability
appearing valid, I think it's fair for the style guide to say that part of
the GNOME style is allowing the user to non-interactively execute and
utilize a given application.

Programmers don't HAVE to implement it, and I brought it up here to ask
gnome-gui whether programmers OUGHT to implement it.  However, I think we
can definitely ask that they DO.