Installer
Anarcat
anarcat at anarcat.ath.cx
Tue Jul 13 10:28:40 PDT 2004
David Johnson wrote:
> I've been thinking about this for quite some time, and tried to rough
> out some designs. The hardest thing to write is this generic UI
> abstraction. The fact that no one has done it successfully before means
> that it's probably not worth the effort. What does exist is at a much
> higher level (dldialog). Trying to map one GUI API onto another is
> extremely problematic. Even writing an API to match another (for
> example a ncurses API that matches the Qt or GTK+ API) will cause
> problems mapping character based UI concepts onto pixel based UI
> concepts.
>
> I think the Linux distros have the right idea with their installers.
> Have a common backend, but write separate UI frontends. This still
> leaves considerable opportunities for common code. Only the actual UI
> need be written twice (or three times).
With my ol' libh maintainer hat on, (which I should really resign from
now, btw) I totally agree with that.
And I'll put it even better: if we struggle to build a "dual-head" GUI
(text + graphics), we end up stuck at 2 interfaces. Hooking in a third
one is much harder than doing it the other way around, which is: design
the machine under, and then program as many views you need.
Model-view-controller comes to my mind now, and I think it's appropriate.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ModelViewController
A.
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