> 
> > I also want my program to have a curses mode, to facilitate a SMIT-like
> 
> Talking about curses... (please don't beat me, i know this is going off-topic
> I've seen there is a CTk (Curses Tk). Has anyone tried CTk/Tk for such a thing
> Would be nice to have one API to produce both curses and X based applications.
> together with perl, this would be just *perfect* :-)
> 
> > by this weekend when I demo NetBSD 1.1 to the Amiga Software Developer's
> > Forum.
> 
> Cool. :) Have a look at
> http://rfhs1012.fh.uni-regensburg.de/~feyrer/NetBSD/meka3.html. ;)
> 
Very cool. The ASDF guys were (for the most part) members of the Software
Distillery (of Amiga fame). Many of these guys were the ones who wrote
the AmigaDOS commands (for example, Jim wrote list and others). Jim 
also works at SAS, who used to make SAS/C (THE Amiga compiler).

A couple of these guys use NetBSD because it *networks* better than the
AmigaOS, with either of the networking packages (AmiTCP or AS225).

When the new release of the AmigaOS comes out, this incentive will be gone.
So I have to put on a really good show. They (and I) find it irritating
to have to go out and find some script to do simple sysadmin tasks.
I also don't like going out to get a 3rd party program to do those same
tasks. NetBSD doesn't come with perl, CTk, C, or all that other stuff
that comes bundled with Linux. We have much smaller distributions, which
I like. But it's a pain to install a NetBSD box and then not be able
to add a user account without knowing about vipw and stuff. And I don't
think that shell scripts are enough for admin tasks. They take up memory
when run, they are slower, and I don't believe you can get them as robust
as a C program. 

Something tells me somebody agrees with me, as no perl/sh/tktcl script has 
gotten into the tree for this purpose.

> 
> > Ideas? Flames? What are the chances of at least adduser getting into
> > the tree? I'm a better programmer than some of my stupider moments
> > would suggest.
> 
> There's a adduser that requires perl
> (ftp.uni-regensburg.de:/pub/NetBSD-Amiga/contrib/adduser-1.2.tar.gz), if you
> want to have a lok at it.
> 

I looked at your script. I also looked at others that people have written.
They make a useful reference for making a C version. Vipw etc. also make a
good reference.

Two more items:
1) Could somebody send me the man page for 4.4BSD adduser (the one from the
   book) so mine can be as close to it as possible. Right now mine does it
   SunOS 4.1.1 style, which is functional but not very nice.

2) As far as a Curses/SMIT style interface, should the curses interface
   be an added option for the regular adduser, kinda like Sun did it with
   some of their tools? That way shell scripts could be built around these
   tools, yet the admin would have the option of a menu.

   How about the X interface being an option program that would come from the
   same sources perhaps, but be #ifdef'd out for normal distributions.
   Then the X version could be compiled and added on later as an extra.
   That way you get the option of X but don't need the X sources to do
   a build of standard NetBSD.

How do people feel about a menu system like SMIT that can be configured
from a menu config file? That way things like X can be put onto the admin
suite without recompiling (for lack of a better name) BSDadmin (or just
bsdadmin). 

I volunteer to write this, so send ideas.
XCOMM --------------------------------------------------------
XCOMM Kevin P. Neal, Sophomore CSC/CPE     kpneal@eos.ncsu.edu 
XCOMM North Carolina State University      kevinneal@bix.com
XCOMM --------------------------------------------------------