Steven D'Aprano posted on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:11:01 +1000 as excerpted: > Separation of the back-end from the front-end is a perfectly sensible > idea. It's only the use of Java as the default front-end which I object > to.
I know I'm late to the party, it's already done and everyone's gone home, so to speak, but a couple thoughts, anyway... 1) (For me personally.) Java? I don't even normally have Java installed. I don't do proprietaryware, and the icedtee freedomware version is still seriously complex to try to build and install on one's own or using scripts, as Gentoo. As such, they don't even have a source based package for it, only the binary. I did recently install it, now that's it's available, for firefox, but it doesn't work with firefox for whatever reason, and thus, I don't know if it even works at all. So if pan /did/ switch to Java (only or as the default), that'd very likely be the last of me you'd see 'round these parts. 2) (More in general.) Now I /did/ not recently that transmission is multi-frontended, with a qt and ncurses frontends among others. The qt frontend is most interesting here as I'm a KDE guy, but also the ncurses frontend so as not to depend on X. I'm doing something very similar with mpd (music player daemon) here, with the CLI and ncurses frontend as well as a qt4 frontend, installed, and find that quite useful compared to my previous music player (kde3 based amarok, the kde4 version killed all the stuff I liked and added a bunch more stuff I didn't care about anyway, so there was no reason to continue with it when I switched to kde4), in part because I'm no longer tied to my X session for my music. As a result, I can seriously appreciate the value of such multiple transmission frontends, and could certainly appreciate pan setup with multiple frontends as well. I'd still be personally staying away from a Java implementation, at least until they get a reasonably end-user (at least Gentoo level end-user) compilable 100% freedomware Java, and that appears to be a ways away yet, but I'd have absolutely no objection to a (or more than one) Java frontend as one among many. And I'd DEFINITELY like a qt4 or kde frontend, as opposed to the gtk frontend, as that would get me that much closer to being able to remove gtk entirely. But, as Charles says, the work investment factor on something like that is way to high to be practical at this point, at least until another dev with rather more time to invest can put in some serious time on pan. So, no such rewrite is practical or likely under current conditions, which rather nixes the idea, presently. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
