"Perry E. Metzger" wrote:

> > Perry - what are you working towards?
> 
> Well, my notion is this: I want a much cleaner way of building and
> customizing install scripts. To that end, I'm building a system that
> will have a curses front end, driven by an embedded scripting language 
> (specifically a tiny scheme interpreter that will easily fit in
> install media). The install scripts will then be largely written in
> scheme, with "the hard stuff" being written in C but invoked from
> scheme.
> 
> Why scheme? I couldn't find any other language that would fit in just
> a few tens of k. Perl takes megs, for instance.

First question - "what's scheme"?  It's a scripting language.  That's
all I know of it.  A quick look at www.scheme.org doesn't show any
"here's a scheme primer in 15 minutes" - I hope the learning curve is
not too high, or I'll be writing some pretty simple scheme and some
complex C "hard stuff" :-)  Can you point me towards any resources?

I guess I'm still not convinced that we have to move away from C.
After all, it's a language that just about everyone in the project is
comfortable with.  Phil's menu/msg stuff still has a lot of potential to
be expanded to include more complex things (see next paragraph).  Still,
I'm open-minded about this...

> As for the curses front end, there are several possibilities. ncurses
> comes with several UI libraries already, and it appears that CDK is
> now going to be an official part of ncurses and maintained by the
> ncurses team, so that's a possibility, too.

My first attempt to use a CDK demo program on a pmax insisted on telling
me it got a particular signal many times until I pressed ^C - never did
look at it again.

For a start, I think we need a decent forms library (I haven't really
checked out the ncurses one), and something that can handle dynamic
scrolling multi-choice menus (think of binary set choice menu with
selectable subsets).

> > This is where again I'll say that I'm very impressed with the
> > terminal-based Solaris install and was planning on pincing many
> > ideas from there.
> 
> Well, since the whole thing is going to be script based, we'll have a
> lot of flexibility in adopting the ideas from such installers.
> 
> I'm going to be starting work in earnest in early June on this, and
> hope to have something viewable by the public about six weeks later.

I'll look forward to it, especially when I work out something about
scheme!

Simon.