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From: lowe@cs.ubc.ca (David Lowe)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Wish list for R5 (resources)
Message-ID: <9182@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 16 Aug 90 16:57:46 GMT
References: <9118@ubc-cs.UUCP> <9008152225.AA06107@expire.lcs.mit.edu>
Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca
Organization: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 30

In article <9008152225.AA06107@expire.lcs.mit.edu> rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bob Scheifler) writes:
>
>    and of most importance there is no standard graphical interface for
>    editing resources and little chance that one could be developed
>    from the current mechanisms.
>
>That's amusing to hear, since someone on my staff developed a graphical
>interface from the current mechanisms, without much trouble.  But perhaps
>you just meant there is little chance of getting a standard one, as opposed
>to little chance of implementing one. :-)

Maybe you could persuade whoever did this to post some information.
There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed, such as parsing
the current user resource file, handling and updating wildcarded entries,
somehow specifying which resources are available for editing, determining
the valid range of entries, and so on.  I would be surprised if this
could be done without creating a separate specification of external
configuration parameters along the lines that I was suggesting.  What
does the user's resource file look like after using this interface?

Maybe all that is needed is some good sample code, and this would become
a defacto standard.  As far as I know, there are no clients in the
standard distribution that provide a graphical interface for changing the
program configuration.  The resource mechanism could still be used for
systems-oriented configuration tasks, such as internationalization.
However, the resource mechanism has not yet shown its suitability for use
in a graphical user interface environment, which was the purpose of X
to begin with.

-- David Lowe