Re: Niche for Hurd - discussion - the power of translators

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 07:33:52PM +0100, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> Am Mittwoch 12 November 2008 04:48:07 schrieb olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net:

> > Anyways, just claiming that it can be done, doesn't help us. If we
> > had a bunch of applications actually following these ideas, so
> > people can see for themselfs, I'm sure it would be much more
> > convincing...
> 
> Can you think of a simplest useful application which utilizes this
> hurdish application structure? 

I think the simplest one among the standard applications that come to
mind might be a chat (IM and/or IRC) client. Most of the tricky
functionality is already covered by standard libraries, that only need
to be wrapped as translators (Flavio already did that for IRC); the rest
is mostly UI implemented on top of it.

However, if implemented as the first application, the UI alone would
still mean a considerable amount of work, as it requires some standard
components (pager, windowing) that are needed for other applications as
well, but not implemented yet...

I wonder whether it's really a good idea to start with standard
applications, or rather try to pick something more specific first?
Something highly individual, where ease of creating custom setups is
immediately useful, might get more attention that yet another chat
client...

(Standard applications on the other hand are interesting to more people,
which might result in more interesting use cases coming up.)

-antrik-