Debconf GNOME UI and libgnome2-perl

[Michael Vogt]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 12:12:34PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Good morning freedom lovers!
Good morning!

[..] 
> I'm not really happy with debconf's current GNOME frontend, so I should make
> it clear that this has influenced my answer. :-) I think we should suffer
> the vte terminal for hoary, but write a great pygtk debconf frontend for our
> next release. It saves us adding the gnome/perl stack to our supported set
> (it's in main now, but only as an explicit seed addition, which we can roll
> back) and saves adding it to desktop (which would impact CD size).

As you probably already guessed I'm very much in favor of adding
libgnome2-perl to the desktop seed for hoary. IMO a not overly nice
GUI is better than having to open the terminal expander and going
through a (not very nice) dialog-frontend (the terminal is hidden by
default now).

The current implementation in synaptic hides the dpkg output
complettly and the user will never have to see it if he does not want
to see it (beside for the rare cases that postinst scripts read from
stdin).

A alternative would be to open the expander with the terminal window
in synaptic automatically if questions are asked. This is not possible
now as synaptic/vte is unable to detect read attempts on the terminals
stdin fd (ideas are welcome how to solve that problem).
 
I agree that having a better gtk debconf frontend for hoary+1 is
something we should go for :)

Cheers,
 Michael

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