Re: Goals for first release (June/USENIX)

[Chris Pressey <cpressey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 12 Mar 2004 16:09:57 -0500
Andrew Atrens <atrens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Chris Pressey wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 Mar 2004 00:21:42 -0800 (PST)
> > There's a general feeling that the UI should be abstract.  That is,
> > we shouldn't tie ourselves down to one sort of interface (like
> > curses.) The frontend and the backend should be seperated, so that
> > different backends (package manager, installer, etc) can use
> > different front ends(curses, web interface, etc.)
> > 
> > There's a couple of ways to go about this.  We could use an API -
> > but that ties us into a particular language (or set of languages
> > that implement the bindings.)  I think it would be better to use
> > IPC.
> 
> How about using XML for the interface?

If there's an established DTD for it, yes.  If not, hardly any point.

There's AAIML, but AFAICT it's not well-established yet.

  http://xml.coverpages.org/userInterfaceXML.html

It's also waaay overkill for what we need IMO.

> Provides a whole of flexibility 
> and even a fair amount of backward compatibility (newer UIs could talk
> to older backends - they (the backends) would just pitch any new 
> commands/attributes/groups they hadn't yet learned of. Older UIs on
> the other hand could talk to any same or newer backend.

Any well-designed protocol will give you this, though.

And in fact a badly designed XML schema could probably break it too :)

-Chris