Re: 2.4 Module List - zenity

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 03:13:09PM +0100, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > From: Bill Haneman [mailto:bill haneman sun com] 
> > There's some circular reasoning going on here that bugs me.
> > 
> > The question is not whether scripts are useful in general, not
> > whether _particular_ scripts are useful, but whether a _general_
> > scripting facility is useful.
> 
> I think it might be useful to a tiny minority, but not much more than via
> any other language binding. I haven't found anything widely-useful on here:
> http://g-scripts.sourceforge.net/
> that isn't now part of Nautilus.
> 
> I'll try to stop ranting now. There's always the chance that there's lots of
> GNOME 2.2 users who still feel the need to write Nautilus scripts.

 I think we must have something like gdialog or zenity in the gnome.
Why:

1) By shipping some dialog-like program, we make it standard - this means
that 
    a) Admins won't have to try all dialog-like stuff from freshmeat
	(there are 5 or so programs on freshmeat currently) and study 
	their homepages (to check whether the project is dead, what bugs
	it has, etc) in order to select a proper tool.
    b) People writing the scripts using dialog-like programs will be able
	to share them with each other (it will be much difficult to share
	scripts if one uses e.g. zenity and other one uses gdialog).
    c) It will really become rather polished and bug-free fast
2) Other parties will be able to rely upon it and will code more things in
    scripts rather than in C code if functionality permits. This will make
    those products much more flexible since it will greatly increase the
    possibility to tweak such stuff (number of people who know sh is
    by orders greater than number ones who know C/perl/python/etc AND are 
    willing to study gtk and stuff).
    
Shell scripts is one of the few things that makes unix powerfull.

Of course it's a pity to have zenity commandline options to be different
from gdialog's ones. It would be much better if its set of commandline
options was a superset of gdialog's ones. Though gdialogs's set of options
is rather inflexible.

> > I don't have an opinion about this particular engine, etc., only
> > that the arguments against it seem a little self-referential.
> 
> That was intentional. I think that if Nautilus scripts are useful then they
> shouldn't be scripts. I was trying to show some of the logical steps along
> the way. 

I think that as much code as possible should be scripts.
Emacs, gimp, source navigator and others are a proof of this concept.

-- 
 Best regards,
  -Vlad