Re: [gtk-list] Re: PROPOSAL: Automatic wrapping of CLIs with GUIs

[Kenneth Albanowski <kjahds kjahds com>]

On 18 Jun 1998 nelson-gtk@crynwr.com wrote:

> Tim O'Neil writes:
>  > > Would it be possible for the freeware community (pushed by GNOME
>  > >developers) to come up with an application level way of allowing this ?
>  > >
>  > >Kate
>  > 
>  > If you feel strongly about such a program, I would say write it.
>  > Then see if it takes hold. Its the only way, really. You never
>  > know, it just might turn out to be The Killer Utility.
> 
> Been there, tried that, didn't get very far with it.  My start at a
> database of option descriptions is at the end.  Unfortunately, I
> started with one of the most optionable programs: ls.  And here's the
> gist of the messages explaining the idea, to and from people.  People
> were basically dubious, not of the value of it, but of the probability
> of my succeeding with it.  ">"-quoted text is written by other people, 
> left-margin text is written by myself.

Some miscellaneous comments of mine: first of all, this has all already
been done. (It would be strange if it had not, after all, it's an obvious
idea.) There is a package (which I forget the name of, amusingly) that
give you a better-then-getopt package which also autogenerates csh
completion records, _and Tcl/Tk dialogs_, among other things.

There's no particular reason why the information must be constrained to
come from one source (a magic option) or another (a database): search all
the options, cache the results, and be happy.

However, all of this presumes that a GUI way of setting options is useful.
Enhanced argument completion is definitely a good idea (I've put together
some zsh code that can complete most `p4` arguments, for example.) but
beyond that it gets a little shaky. Does one _really_ want a GUI
interaction to `ls`, especially if the result is no better then the ls
command line?

Someone was complaining that it's not obvious what switches are needed to
get `diff` to generate legal `patch` input (which is true), and that a GUI
would help (which is _not_). The only way to solve this is to make the
documentation for `diff` (or `patch`) explain what options are needed, or
add a new "--patch" switch to `diff` (which would certainly be available
from the GUI). The point being that turning a command line into radio
buttons, check boxes and file selectors is not going to magically turn a
command-line app into a GUI wonder. This sort of technique is not very
like to be able to turn the infozip tools into `winzip`. 

-- 
Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com, CIS: 70705,126)