Re: [Synaptic-devel] Updated UI Proposal

[Michael Vogt]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 12:42:45PM +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > Le Vendredi 23 Janvier 2004 10:31, Sebastian Heinlein a écrit :
> > > To get a better idea about the design I have made a fake screenshot. You
> > > can download it here (88 kbyte):
> > 
> > This rocks! Following previous disucussions, if there is way to replace the 
> > text-based console with a progress bar, Synaptic would rock even more.
> 
> Dpkg still doesn't give you a progress bar? Duh.. so it seems. I wonder if
> you could do what Synaptic on RPM does for the things where rpm doesn't
> provide real progress info: show the dpkg output text in a label and have
> two progress bars going back and forth to give an impression something is
> happening.
> 
> But then installing .deb's can be an interactive process, I don't know if 
> it's possible to invoke a terminal just for those cases?

This is a really hard job :/ 

Dpkg does not give any real status information that can be parsed and
dpkg interals aren't something you want to work on. It's really messy
code. And, to make thinks worse, there are still packages that
require terminal input. Exim (the default MTA for debian) has this
nice line in it's postinst script:

           if [ "$DEBIAN_FRONTEND" != "noninteractive" ]; then
                /usr/sbin/eximconfig $*
            fi

/usr/sbin/eximconf is a perl script that displays choices and wants
keybord input. So even if you choose "gnome" as your debconf frontend,
you get a messy terminal. The same is true if dpkg finds a modified
config file. It will ask if the config-file should be left untouched
or overwritten. This needs terminal input as well. 
 
So, until dpkg and a bunch of debian packages aren't updated, we won't
have a any choice IMHO. 

bye,
 Michael

-- 
Linux is not The Answer. Yes is the answer. Linux is The Question. - Neo