Re: [gnome-db] getting mergeant to 1.0

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 08:21, Danilo Schoeneberg wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 02:55, Chris Silles wrote:
> > On Thursday 18 September 2003 00:32, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > > If people can comment on this app, or any other with good UIs, please do
> > > it. I would like to start working on all this (or whatever comes up)
> > > ASAP, so please, comment quick, so that we can take advantage of the 6
> > > months cycle.
> 
> Well if you really look for some example of a good UI, I think a look at
> T.O.A.D is the best way to do so. It's a developer tool designed for
> Oracle databases and enjoys huge success in professional companies. Our
> company for instance is flogging out some serious money for it every
> year and having such a tool for Gtk+ Environments with the added bonus
> of access to other databases could prove quite a rewarding step.
> 
I know TOAD, and I like it, but its UI is a bit complicated, since its
got too much information on it. We can have all that info, but I think
it should be more hidden than what it is in TOAD.

What we want is a UI that can be used by normal users and by power
users. We dont want to limit it to neither of them, we want to support
both. So, we need some way to access power features, but hiding them
from the normal UI as much as possible.

Also, one of the wins in GNOME 2.x is the simplicity of the UIs, which
doesnt mean they dont have features, it means the UI is not cluttered
with hundreds of options, menu items, etc

> > As of yet I haven't been able to check out Mergeant since my machines don't 
> > seem to want to cooperate with Gnome, however Danilo has brought the concept 
> > of other UI's to my attention before and this seems like a suitable time and 
> > place to contribute them.
> 
> Well apart from the pain we shared getting your machines to accept some
> gnome-ish sources [remind me to slap the first SuSE employee that I
> should ever happen to run into ;)] ...
> I agree with Chris on that part, we should provide more variety on the
> tool sector. We should also think about integration into configuration
> tools like SuSE's yast or whatever the big distro's use.
> 
yes, this is a nice idea. But I'd vote for integrating it into
gnome-system-tools.

I mean, I've got nothing against SuSe or any other distro, but the plan
is to integrate with GNOME as much as possible, of course, leaving
libgda being independent of GNOME, as it already is. So, I'd prefer we
concentrate on doing integration work in GNOME.

> > I think we could benefit from a command-line 'monitor' program (similar to 
> > those supplied with most db backends).. While this wouldn't be too 
> > complicated to create, it would require absolute conformity from all 
> > providers (with respect to handling of NON-SELECT queries and similar 
> > inconsistencies - which hopefully will be eradicated in the near future).
> 
> Bingo! That idea has been brought up in the past and something in the
> line of mysql, psql or Sql*Plus is definitely needed. I think I have
> some started sources on my home machine already.
> 
hmm, could you see how to integrate those sources with the current
gda-config-tool?

> > An extension on this idea would be an ncurses based User Interface, a 
> > text-mode Mergeant as it were. If there is any interest in this I could be 
> > tempted to satisfy my masochistic urges and have a go at it.. (Could be quite 
> > useful for remote management of libgda systems?)
> 
> not quite sure on that one, it would be a considerable pain to implement
> some usefull way to display for instance a db-table or result set and
> I'm not sure if the demand would really make it worth the pain you're
> about to suffer from ;-)
> 
yeah, forget the ncurses UI :-)

> Ps: off-record question, is that "Cheers" sorta becoming standard around
> here ? ;-)
> 
yeah cheers :-)