Re: OT: automation

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 03:38:45PM +0100, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

> One additional idea: How about being able to call the GUI commands
> from the shell? 
> 
> (btw: KDE offers part of that via dbus/dcop, but not really perfect, I
> think, because it's too complex to use)

That's right at the heart of my ideas regarding a better desktop
environment :-)

All this dbus (or dcop or corba or whatever) stuff is meaningless in
practice, as it does some magic in the background, but hardly anyone is
even aware what happens there; much less knows how to make use of this.

That's where the Hurd comes in: with the extensible VFS, it's possible
for every component to offer a *filesystem* interface that can be used
by other components, by external scripts, or even by users directly.
That's a much more transparent, convenient, and universal interface --
and thus offers an approach to modularity that actually could work for a
change :-)

-antrik-