The more I'm using my 0810 alpha2 install, the more it appears that there is still a lot missing from the cleancore scripts that replaced the launch manager.
After talking on IRC, I can see why the launch manager was done away with:
- It relies on QT4, so it needs to be ported from QT3
- Using the QT library ties it in too much to KDE. Ridding this gets us closer to getting LMCE to run on Ubuntu
- It is graphical. It is desired to have it as a CLI tool that can run on anything such as a purely dedicated core with no monitor.
Now I'm wondering if we should port launch-manager to purely cli. The launch manager logic has been well proven in LMCE versions up to this point, and is relatively bug free. It would be trivial to re-write it so that:
- It has no GUI... Get rid of the QT4 all together
- Anywhere there was a QT widget to provide feedback to the UI, replace it with with echos to the terminal like any normal CLI utility
- Anywhere that launch-manager received input from the UI, replace this functionallity with command line parameters
The above approach would leverage that fact that the launch_manager logic is sound and works, as well as catering to the goals of having a CLI utility that accomplishes these tasks. It would also save a lot of time and effort developing, testing and debugging the cleancore scripts to provide the equivalent functionallity.
The other option of course is to port it to QT4 which should be quite simple with the QT3 compatibility library and tools such as qt3to4
Any additional thoughts on this? I have a 4-day weekend coming up and will have time to do something productive.
