On 30 Nov, 14:55, Donn Ingle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > Okay, so I am in the mood to try this: Inform the user about what modules > the app requires in a graphical dialogue that can vary depending on what > the system already has installed. (It will fail-to output on cli) > > I am running Kubuntu and I seem to have 'kdialog' installed by default (not > sure if it came as stock.)
I think it's part of KDE. You can check by doing something like... dpkg -S kdialog That should tell you about the package which provided it, which is possibly one of the KDE packages. > What other 'stock' systems are there out there in the wild? Ubuntu? Suse? > Fedora? Others? There's Xdialog which is the old-fashioned graphical dialogue tool and Zenity: the oddly named GNOME successor to gdialog. See this article for some details: http://www.linux.com/articles/114156 > I would take a stab at wrapping them in python so that I can use the first > dialogue system found to popup messages for the user. > > (Hoping, natch, that this has already been done ... ? ) I wanted to do this for the desktop module [1], but without any obvious dialogue tool support for Windows, I didn't proceed any further than a simple wrapping around KDialog, Zenity and Xdialog, since the aim is to cover more than the usual UNIX-like platforms. However, I could make that code available separately, or someone could tell me how Windows and Mac OS X manage to perform the same tricks. Perhaps some nasty win32 API dialogues need to be created by hand on Windows - something which I certainly have no interest in doing, but someone might find it exciting work. I thought that there was another package out there which wrapped these programs, but I can't seem to find it right now. It's certainly worth trying to make a generic interface, though, since the features provided by each of the programs do differ in certain important ways which you might not care too much about if you only really care about portability. For example, if you want to have a list of choices, I seem to recall that KDialog offers much more flexibility than Zenity (whose method of presenting various things is fairly awful at times), but the lowest common denominator might well be better than reading up on all the options for each of the programs and coding something up yourself. Paul [1] http://www.python.org/pypi/desktop -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
