[Mageia-dev] Proposed Feature:UiAbstraction4mcc

Wed Jun 13 13:59:11 CEST 2012

*Problem*
+
+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)
+
+*Possible solution* 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.
+
+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 ??
+
+
+  Why it would be good for Mageia to include it
+
+It would provide consistency across terminal and gui administration, and 
+in doing so provide an easy entry into text based administration for 
+novices.
+
+Providing the abstraction layer would mean all modules created will be 
+available to all users.
+
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