Providing a default graphical environment on FreeBSD

[Matthias Andree]

Am 17.09.2012 19:51, schrieb Lorenzo Cogotti:
> Il 17/09/2012 19:26, Adrian Chadd ha scritto:
>> What are you trying to achieve?
>>
>> Are you trying to write a set of utilities for FreeBSD that are GUI in
>> nature? And you'd like to know which toolkit is "blessed" for a
>> consistent, integrated feel and development environment?
>>
>>
>>
>> Adrian
>>
> 
> Right now I was interested in creating a desktop oriented automounter,
> in order to experiment with devd (I don't know if something useful will
> actually come out of it). I then faced the problem that there are lots
> of GUI toolkits, lots of scenarios to take into account, lots of desktop
> environments available, basically the problem is the same that Linux has
> with its non existing userland.

Meaning that you have not separated the issues that matter:

(A) the actual automounting stuff, with details such as user permissions,

(B) from the graphical presentation,

(C) from the integration into desktops.

These are segregated concerns!

The XDG and freedesktop stuff, like it or not, managed to get some
arrangements made that are followed by GNOME and KDE, for instance.

Oh, and yes, someone has to make choices and decisions here.  If you
want to continue letting people choose freely, this will not ever change.

> A FreeBSD project (like geli or gpart) could even go as far as providing
> an official GUI utility next to the text based utility, without hoping
> for the specific desktop project to provide it (like devd integration).

Who cares - the stuff you name is required so early in the boot process
that you will create a nice hen-and-egg problem around which file system
you have the gazillion of GUI files in.

And possibly providing a working abstraction that just has a sane API is
far more useful than any of your talk about graphics and desktops.

-- 
Matthias Andree