An Open Letter to Ubuntu Developers

[Fergal Daly]

On 16 September 2010 13:29, Jan Claeys <lists at janc.be> wrote:
> Op maandag 06-09-2010 om 17:05 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Tony
> Atkinson:
>> 3) Link GUI & CLI operations using common syntax
>>
>> I'm in two minds about including this,
>> as this is not a usual use-case for the majority of people
>> but I'd love for all GUI applications to be invokable via the CLI, using
>> some standard syntax
>> I've found that often times I'll use a GUI app to perform some set of
>> operations, then I'm wanting to perform the same operations across
>> multiple files, and currently I'm forced to find alternative apps of
>> automating said operations
>>
>> Eg. I've recently needed to perform the following operations on several
>> hundred photos
>> in order for them to blend in with a user-configurable webpage colour
>> scheme
>> (Making an image whose background gradually fades to transparent at the
>> image boundaries)
>> - Open image in the Gimp
>> - add a transparent layer
>> - Select all
>> - Shrink selection by 5px
>> - Feather selection by 5px
>> - Invert selection
>> - Clear selection (to transparent)
>> - Save as a PNG
>
>> Surely it should be possible to automate such GUI operations using a CLI
>> interface
>> and if you've got experience with a specific desktop app, I think it
>> would be hugely beneficial if you could keep using the same program both
>> on the GUI and on the CLI
>>
>>         for IMG_FILE in $IMG_FILES; do
>>                 gimp-cli
>>         --process="layer-add:transparent;select-all;select-shrink:5px;select-feather:5px;select-invert;select-clear;file-save:${IMG_FILE}.png" $IMG_FILE
>>         done
>
> Your proposal must have been read and implemented by somebody with a
> time machine, as The GIMP's batch mode has been around for years.  ;-)
>
>
> I think doing that in a general way with all GUI applications would mean
> that you would have to add support for a common scripting engine to all
> applications, somewhat like AppleScript on Mac OS, or ActiveX scripting
> in Windows.  Some applications might need major changes to make that
> possible, and in some cases it would significantly bloat them or
> (partially) duplicate existing scripting functionality (that can't be
> removed for backwards compatibility or because it has more/other
> features).

The Amiga had ARexx (Rexx itself came from IBM mainframes). Every
"real" Amiga application exposed its functionality via its ARexx port
which was basically just a way of delivering strings and get strings
back in reply.

There is no need to build the scripting engine into every application.
ARexx was just a scripting language with a built-in ability to
communicate over ARexx ports. I wrote perl ARexx bindings so that I
wouldn't have to learn yet another scripting language.

These days, using JSON or something like that instead of ad-hoc text
commands would probably be best.

Being able to script across almost all of your (GUI) apps let people
do great things with ARexx.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx


All that said, don't DCop for KDE and dbus for gnome provide the
basics of this (when the app has bothered to implement them)?

F

> The first thing to do if you want to see this happening would be to get
> all desktop environments to agree on a common system for this (probably
> through FreeDesktop.org).  Good luck with that...
>
>
> --
> Jan Claeys
>
>
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