Re: Balsa Release (druid)

[Peter Williams <peter newton cx>]

On Thu, 02 Dec 1999 15:34:37 Knut Neumann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> If noone else thinks that should be done right away, I might get it done over
> the weekend, though I still have the rewrite of the druid stuff on my list (just
> because I wanted to play with gnome-druid anyway and its commented with "could
> be rewritten at some point" anyways) and did not manage to do it since days...
> 
> -Knut
> 

Hi, I'm the author of the first version of the Druid. Yes, it is very ugly. 
I was planning on fixing some bugs with it soon. What kind of rewrite were you
intending? The Right Thing is to make our own GnomeDruidPage subclasses, but I
think that seems like a bit much for the installation code... I don't know how
much of a size impact it would have but I think it would be nontrivial. 

Of course, the current code baggage may offset the size of implementing the
druid 'correctly'. Or, if we want to go a little overboard, the installer could
be a shared library loaded only when necessary. This may in fact be my preferred
way of doing it.

The other half is the usability of the installer. Comments I've heard include
that there's too much text to read and too many separate pages. We could probably
skip some of the confirmations... I was thinking of a page with 'The following
directories and files will be created: <....>' just before the installer finished.
The five mailboxes could be implicitly created... I was thinking 'What directory
should the default Balsa mailboxes go in? <entry> or <Let me specify the location
of each box individually>.'

That about covers it. I'd very much like to hear your ideas before we get to
work on this. Then I can work on the next druid, most likely the "New Mailbox"
dialog....

==============================
Peter Williams peter@newton.cx