Re: [Monotone-devel] GUI communication.

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 03:11:17PM +0200, Zbigniew Zag?rski wrote:
> Hi.
> Anybody working on GUI ?
> 
> In fact i'd like to start writing some GUI to monotone. And i'm thinking
> how to start and how to do this. Now i'm about to write this in
> wxWindows, and communicate with monotone via stdin/stdout.
> 
> Of course it would be nice to link monotone into GUI application, but it
>  easier to maintain one application and use monotone as "external tool".
> This is true with assuption, that monotone text ui will be quite stable.

I think this is probably a reasonable way to do things.  We should
think about making an "automation interface" to monotone, though;
basically a mode in which monotone's output is easily parseable and
guaranteed not to change incompatibly... currently, there's some stuff
that's hard to read out of its output.

Before you get too far, you might want to look at the
net.venge.monotone.gui branch, which contains several nascent guis.

> Other way of communication (which appeared when i've read commands.cc)
> which i have on mind is to make monotone read commends from stdin and
> process it in without exiting. Session would look like this.
[snip]

One could do this, certainly, but what would be the advantage over
just calling monotone multiple times?  Is there really a
non-negligible speed cost to spawning monotone repeatedly?

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"But in Middle-earth, the distinct accusative case disappeared from
the speech of the Noldor (such things happen when you are busy
fighting Orcs, Balrogs, and Dragons)."