[GRASS5] Platform for next generation UI

[Michael Barton]

INDEED!

That is why it will be important to have support from the broader community
and not just a 'UI development team'.

Is there anything that I and/or others (e.g., another person offered TclTk
help) could do with TclTk (since we are already invested in it) to take some
of the interim steps you mention while a more complete system is under
development? I'm fooling around with vtcl and it seems to be not crashing
now.

Michael
__________________________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-2402

phone: 480-965-6213
fax: 480-965-7671
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton



> From: Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>
> Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2006 20:10:30 +0000
> To: Michael Barton <michael.barton at asu.edu>
> Cc: Trevor Wiens <twiens at interbaun.com>, grass5 <grass5 at grass.itc.it>
> Subject: Re: [GRASS5] Platform for next generation UI
> 
> 
> Michael Barton wrote:
> 
>> My main goal has been to try to have some kind of organized, coordinated
>> effort in developing a new UI. GRASS seems a rather diffuse open source
>> project, which means that it is open to a wider variety of contributors and
>> more difficult to organize. It seems like we need to get a few energetic
>> people to give a UI a trial run and then try to build some support for it.
>> I'm trying to spark that.
> 
> One final point to bear in mind is that much (maybe even most) of the
> work required for a good GUI consists of making the rest of GRASS more
> GUI-friendly, e.g.:
> 
> + Removing assumptions about having access to a terminal, or even to
> stdin/stdout.
> + Minimising dependence upon global state (WIND, $GISRC, monitor pads,
> etc).
> + Improving modules' metadata (e.g. the information used by
> G_parser()).
> 
> Part of that involves getting rid of stuff which is GUI-unfriendly,
> e.g. use of the vask library, G_ask(), R_get_location_with_*() etc. In
> order to do that without leaving GRASS in a crippled state, some of it
> will need to be replaced. In that regard, a basic GUI in e.g. Tcl/Tk
> or wxPython could accelerate some of the tasks which need to be done
> in preparation for a "real" GUI.
> 
> -- 
> Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>