Re: cd burning in gnome

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Thu, 2002-12-05 at 22:32, Bowie J. Poag wrote:

> > I beg to differ. "GUI"s that are wrappers for a command-line executable
> > have consistently presented terrible interfaces to the user.
> 
> I would argue that. A change of a library may break several programs,
> whereas a change of an executable breaks none. You will still have the
> ability to burn, no matter what. Hence, my remark about leaving yourself an
> out --- Again, Reading is FUN-demental!

A change of library should never do this, because we have versioning. 
Installing a new library with the same version that isn't backwards
compatible is really no different than installing a sed binary that
isn't backwards compatible - either way, you end up with breakage,
usually on a large scale (based on how many programs you have that use
the library, and how many scripts/programs you have that use sed).

> 
> > Libraries that are used by both a command-line
> > client and a GUI tend to turn out better.
> 
> Yes, yes, and i'm going to build an engine that runs on spotted owls and
> bald eagle heads. Your logic doesn't hold up -- By keeping an executable in
> place, by your same logic, allows multiple authors to write multiple
> front-ends using multiple languages.

Riiight... because the interfaces to command-line apps *never* change.
;-)  Output that is scanned (should always be done) changes a lot, input
parameters can change from time to time, return codes, etc.  There's a
big different between wrapping something standard like grep and wrapping
something as massive and complex as cdrecord, or some other app.

> 
> > Still, at times they suffer
> > from the same problem if the library is too high level and wasn't
> > designed primarily to drive a graphical interface (look at video-lan for
> > a good example of a program that seems to suffer from this problem).
> 
> It only turns out poorly in the hands of poor programmers. Drawing
> comparrisons between shoddy code and shoddy methodology is a mistake.

> 
> Cheers,
> Bowie
> 
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.