[Pan-users] Re: 0.134 and Beyond

[Duncan]

Steven D'Aprano posted on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:11:01 +1000 as excerpted:

> Separation of the back-end from the front-end is a perfectly sensible
> idea. It's only the use of Java as the default front-end which I object
> to.

I know I'm late to the party, it's already done and everyone's gone home, 
so to speak, but a couple thoughts, anyway...

1) (For me personally.)  Java?  I don't even normally have Java 
installed.  I don't do proprietaryware, and the icedtee freedomware 
version is still seriously complex to try to build and install on one's 
own or using scripts, as Gentoo.  As such, they don't even have a source 
based package for it, only the binary.  I did recently install it, now 
that's it's available, for firefox, but it doesn't work with firefox for 
whatever reason, and thus, I don't know if it even works at all.

So if pan /did/ switch to Java (only or as the default), that'd very 
likely be the last of me you'd see 'round these parts.

2) (More in general.)  Now I /did/ not recently that transmission is 
multi-frontended, with a qt and ncurses frontends among others.  The qt 
frontend is most interesting here as I'm a KDE guy, but also the ncurses 
frontend so as not to depend on X.  I'm doing something very similar with 
mpd (music player daemon) here, with the CLI and ncurses frontend as well 
as a qt4 frontend, installed, and find that quite useful compared to my 
previous music player (kde3 based amarok, the kde4 version killed all the 
stuff I liked and added a bunch more stuff I didn't care about anyway, so 
there was no reason to continue with it when I switched to kde4), in part 
because I'm no longer tied to my X session for my music.  As a result, I 
can seriously appreciate the value of such multiple transmission 
frontends, and could certainly appreciate pan setup with multiple 
frontends as well.

I'd still be personally staying away from a Java implementation, at least 
until they get a reasonably end-user (at least Gentoo level end-user) 
compilable 100% freedomware Java, and that appears to be a ways away yet, 
but I'd have absolutely no objection to a (or more than one) Java 
frontend as one among many.  And I'd DEFINITELY like a qt4 or kde 
frontend, as opposed to the gtk frontend, as that would get me that much 
closer to being able to remove gtk entirely.

But, as Charles says, the work investment factor on something like that 
is way to high to be practical at this point, at least until another dev 
with rather more time to invest can put in some serious time on pan.  So, 
no such rewrite is practical or likely under current conditions, which 
rather nixes the idea, presently.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman