Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Canonical wrapper?

[Jani Monoses]

> So?  Are they going to be happy if they get saddled with a wrapper
> that doesn't fit them very well now and gets deprecated 6 months

Happier I suppose than with trying to grok all the tla lowlevel commands

> later?  Of course not.  What they really need is something that is
> getting tested on a daily basis by lots of users with varying kinds of
> needs.  The way to build toward that is for people supporting such

Right. Bundling the wrappers with tla will get that kind of daily testing.

> So anointing a candidate now will just lead to the Emacs people using
> something based on Emacs, and others using aba, and others depending on
> bash or zsh completion and scripts, and about half of the experienced
> users doing none of the above, because they're happy with their
> homebrew wrappers, and nothing will change much, except that newbies
> will use the "official" wrapper until they realize that none of the
> old-timers are using it and it's not keeping up with the development
> in the rest of Arch.

As I said in my previous mail, if experienced users have better wrappers these
can replace the current ones. The goal is having at least one wrapper to ease
new users experience.And more people contributing on them the better.
aba, Miles' scripts and xtla are doing slightly differnet things and can be
merged or all of them bundled.

> 
>     Jani> There are not so many and keeping them out of tree makes new
>     Jani> ones appear.  Choice sucks in this case too because it makes
>     Jani> you try out all the possibilities to decide which is
>     Jani> best.
> 
> Hey, guess what?  _You haven't mentioned your favorite yet._  If you
> don't have strong enough feelings about which one you want to mention
> it in a thread on the subject of choosing a wrapper that you've posted
> to several times, what makes you think anybody does, or that we can
> get agreement?

My point exactly. I don't have a favorite. I would be happy to work with
anything bundled with tla and also would work on improving it if I can.

Why do you this happens pretty often:

new user: how do I do X?
Aaron: well I just have that functionality in aba you know.


>     Jani> The current approaches are not so radically different
>     Jani> IMHO so as to say competition is good because it leads to
>     Jani> exploring various novel ways in wrapping tla in a scripting
>     Jani> language.
> 
> I disagree.  An approach that requires installing and using Emacs
> (IIRC, xtla) _is_ radically different from a standalone UI like aba.

Yes but I consider xtla orthogonal/complementary to aba or other wrappers.
I was comparing existing shell/python/perl wrappers and future pika/furth etc
wrappers. Consider I'd start writing a set of ruby wrappers. Now where would
be the advantage of that over existing ones besides me learning ruby?
The same thing happened I think with the arch GUIs. Java, GTK, QT separtate
implementations each with it's own look purpose and bugs and one must try them
all if one wants to chose one.

>     Jani> less friendly UI :) And it seems to me you're forgetting

> Just by jawbone: accusing the people who have done all the work to
> date (plus a few less-than-innocent bystanders like me) of behaving
> sadistically toward new users.

See the smiley?Je n'accuse pas! It's not sadistic although it is a kind of
patronizing attitude and I'm sure those who have it know it and are proud of
it. That's ok but then admit it please. No default wrappers, no spoonfeeding
for newbies but lurk around on the list/wiki/irc and besides getting
answers to questions you wouldn't have had in the first place if we had had
it your way, you'll learn a lot about good design, Tom's and others insightful
opinions about various stuff, LISP, security etc.
While there are people who are happy with this (me included) it will just
scare away others.