It is apparent to me that Manoj has stepped into some sort of time warp here and come back to the present with a good vision of the future. I think we all should study his work carefully. Many of the points contained therein lead me to believe he has gone psychic on us. Do I need to wear a metallic helmet to keep him from reading my mind?
Here's a good example: Lately, I have been using mc (Midnight Commander) to cruise through my debian mirror. I can position on a single .deb file or tag multiple files. Then I hit F2 followed by @ (do something with the selected file(s)) and enter the command: dpkg -i (install it) or dpkg -iGOEB (same as dselect install without recursing the entire world) Manoj is outlining a specification that would be great for the above method. Standardized components could be tied into mc and similar interfaces easily. I would love to be able to hit the F3 (view) key in mc on a .deb file and get a nice summary of control info and status. Then hit the F4 (edit) or other appropriate key and get an option menu (remove, force, upgrade, ....) and act on it. We definitely need a new dselect, but providing a way to handle packages from existing shells, file managers, etc. would solve a lot of the interim problems. On 12 Apr 1997, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > * The package should be able to work stand alone, however, it should > provide libraries so that the dependency checks and topological > sorts on new packages are available to other scripts/programs as > well. (like dftp, auto build a whole distribution from scratch, > other dependency checkers). Yes, so I can add an ftp interface that only gets needed files, adds them to the "mirror" directory and preserves original file date/time. It would first check CD index files and prompt for CD mounting. Sort of a combination automount/mirror/installer daemon? Go to other mirrors if necessary. First get higher priority files. Get other files without hogging resources/bandwidth. Don't bother with files of no interest at all (for many:all those other xservers, programming languages, etc.) > * The package should be a user interface only, all functionality > should be wrapped into the libraries so that alternate user > interfaces would be easy (using ncurses, perltk, dialog, CGI, etc > one can have multiple front ends). Yes! Yes! Yes! Most newbies are comfortable with a web browser. Give them an installer script to get the web server, browser, etc., installed and they will be overjoyed. > * The package should also be able to do dependency satisfaction checks > on other relationship fields in the package (Recommends, and > Suggests) as well, if asked by the user. Another area where HTML/CGI would shine. Note: I think a Perl5 module should be developed concurrently with this. It would provide a method for testing the library with various user interfaces during the development. First make it work correctly and then make it faster. +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Paul Wade Greenbush Technologies Corporation + + mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.greenbush.com/ + +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ + http://www.wtop.com/ What does W.T.O.P. mean? + +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
