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<p><b>Problem</b>
</p>
<p>MCC is great, and I would love to be able to admin using it
regardless of whether I am using text interface or gtk/qt.
The interface is completely different in curses than gtk
interfaces. Curses version is a second rate citizen, and Gui is
all GTK. A lot of the tools are not available in curses interface,
for instance, I don't see a way to install software or managing
repositories.
It would be nice to have qt version as well as gtk (not a major
issue, but would be nice)
</p>
<p><b>Possible solution</b>
I have thought how this could be addressed and feel that in the
long term, the best solution would be to have the interface layer
abstracted. So when developing a module, you use the mcc UI
library, so you may call for instance mccGui.pushButton then if
you are running in curses it creates a curses button, if you are
in KDE it creates a QPushButton, if you are in Gnome it creates a
GTKButton. This would take a great deal of work, so I started
looking around to find any existing libraries. The first place I
looked was openSuSE as Yast does exactly what I am describing. In
yast, the interface is laid out and works the same way whether you
are using curses, Gtk or Qt. To my surprise they have put a lot of
work into separating their Ui library from the Yast tools. You can
use the library to write curses/gtk/qt programs that use the
appropriate widget as needed, independent of Yast.
We could use the Yast Back end, and adapt our front end to use it.
This option would take the least amount of work, as there are perl
bindings to the yast libraries, and so it would only be the gui
layer that would need reworking. The current gtk only modules
could become curses/qt/gtk modules by changing the gtk calls to
yast backend calls.
</p>
<p>Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that we port Yast to
Mageia, I am suggesting we use its Ui abstraction only. I use
Mageia over openSuse for many reasons, but I do admire how well
Yast works, and would love to see similar in Mageia. Perhaps we
could start planning the next generation of MCC ??
</p>
<h1><small><small> <span class="mw-headline"
id="Why_it_would_be_good_for_Mageia_to_include_it"> Why it
would be good for Mageia to include it </span></small></small></h1>
<p>It would provide consistency across terminal and gui
administration, and in doing so provide an easy entry into text
based administration for novices.
</p>
<p>Providing the abstraction layer would mean all modules created
will be available to all users.
</p>
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