Re: Goals for first release (June/USENIX)

[Andrew Atrens <atrens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Pressey wrote:
> 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.

Not sure how this is relevant. If you're going to be building a protocol 
from scratch anyways, coming up with a dtd doesn't sound like a lot of work.

Check out -

http://xmlfiles.com/dtd/


> 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.

Yah, could be overkill. But it seems to me that it's the modern way to 
go, IMHO.


> > 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 :)

Good design, bad design. Whether you are using xml or a c-struct, or 
even bytestring interface a hammer in the hands of a monkey is still a 
hammer :) :)


> -Chris