Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: community spirit

[Aaron Bentley]

Thomas Lord wrote:
>     > From: Dustin Sallings <address@hidden>
>
>     > 	I agree with most of what you said, and I agree that it just feels 
>     > wrong to have to install a wrapper to use a tool because the base tool 
>     > doesn't cover some common cases, but the problem is not so much the 
>     > list of dependencies.  The dependencies I had for installing tla in the 
>     > first place were much larger than any wrapper I've used to date.
>
> In some sense, I think that part of what we're running up against in
> the UI area is simply that arch makes some really quite complicated
> maneuvers achievable and desirable, but our current UI technologies
> have precious little support for "complicated maneuvers" because the
> applications they provide access to tend to be so ... well
> ... simple-minded.
>
> I think there is room here for real UI inventiveness -- coming up with 
> really effective tools for empowering arch users.
>
> Wrappers seem to me like a basically sound approach: towards tla 2.0,
> I hope to formalize the inputs and outputs of 'tla' a bit more, giving
> them a well defined structure from which fancier UIs may be, largely
> automatically, derived.

I agree with Dave Allouche here: it's hard for an interface to serve two 
 masters, especially ones as different as user input and scripting. 
For example, input validation is a good thing when dealing with user 
input; who knows what they'll do next?  But when the script has already 
performed input validation, doing it again just hurts.

"changes" is a good example: when a user specifies a full revision, you 
need to make sure the revision already exists.  But if the script has 
already verified that the revision exists, repeating the check is a waste.

Scripts often want to piece tla functionality together in different 
ways, and having to execute tla repeatedly, especially when it means 
repeatedly making remote archive connections, can really hurt performance.

Allouche and I have been kicking some ideas around today, but don't have 
anything formal to propose.

Aaron

--
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
Panometrics, Inc.