Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 10:37:18 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Nate Eldredge <eldredge AT ap DOT net>
cc: elpee AT geocities DOT com, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Want ng/mail list input
In-Reply-To: <199803092349.PAA11566@adit.ap.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.980310103658.3898F-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Precedence: bulk


On Mon, 9 Mar 1998, Nate Eldredge wrote:

> At 01:26  3/8/1998 -0800, elpee AT geocities DOT com wrote:
> [snipped]
> > and less than IDE.  Of course, gcc, gxx, rhide, djtar, gdb, symify,
> > studedit, stubify and alot of other commonly used programs by the
> > DJGPP community will be supported but I'd like to what every body
> > want supported.  The sole purpose of front end is to DJGPP users
> > the ability to use all the command line options when coding,
> > compiling, debugging their work. 
> 
> `make', `grep', `find', `awk', `sed', maybe `ar' and `tar'.

Why do you need to second-guess user's preferences at all?  In my
experience, the programs people use are heavily influenced by their
personal preferences and past experience; making all, or even most of
them happy is next to impossible.

So I would suggest to have two features in this front end:

   1) Provide a means to type and run a command just as if the user
      would from the DOS prompt (by passing the text as the argument
      to the `system' library function).

   2) If you make a point of providing a dialog for each program where
      a user can select options by clicking on buttons, make that
      facility extensible by providing a way to define a dialog for
      any command (e.g., by creating a file with the descriptions of
      its options), then define the dialogs for the programs you think
      most people will want using that extension machinery.

Just my $0.02.