Re: Bounce a few ideas off

["Michael K. Johnson" <johnsonm redhat com>]

Toshio Kuratomi writes:
>On Tue, 21 Apr, 1998 at 08:19:38PM -0500, Kenneth R. Kinder set free these words:
>>  * System utilities converted to GNOME
>> 
>Hmmm... If you think a GUI will make these things more intuitive for a newbie,
>sure, go ahead....  I'm not sure a GUI is the answer to everything (on the
>other hand, norton disk doctor is certainly a lot more inviting than fsck....)

I'd like to suggest that instead of "porting" those apps to gtk, folks
consider writing gui wrappers for them.  Particularily setuid ones,
as gtk has NOT been gone through for the kinds of bugs that could
easily create security holes in setuid programs...

In general, the text versions will be the ones that the original authors
maintain, and if you try to "port" them you'll have a world of difficulty
keeping up when bugs are found in the originals.  Take fsck, for example.
When Ted releases a new version of ext2tools, there's usually a good
reason to put it on your system...

I'd suggest that if the current interface is hard to wrap, folks interested
in this talk to the authors of the original tools and see if you can add
an easy-to-wrap interface to the tools as maintained by the original
maintainer; that will make your job incredibly easier when it comes to
maintaining the software.

I hope that's useful...

michaelkjohnson

"Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the
 prudent as the heavy petting of literature."            -- Fran Lebowitz
 Linux Application Development       http://www.redhat.com/~johnsonm/lad/