Re: Seating (was: Re: Gradebook development)

[Micah Yoder <LYoder@cyberis.net>]

Doug Loss wrote:

> The other is courseware and Micah's educational launchpad.  We've lately
> been talking about using the GNOME panel as the UI for the edulp, and
> using some GNOME widgets (or the appropriate XML data) to store the
> progress information that will be used to determine how to alter the
> user's level of access to various options.  This effort hasn't actually
> considered alternate UIs, I don't think.

I may have missed something, but I'm still a bit confused as to why
you'd want to use XML for something like edulp.  Seems like that would
complicate things, and I think a simple DBM database suffices pretty
nicely for this sort of thing.

If you REALLY want to get the goal/progress info into other programs,
either they could be made to read the DBMs or there could be a DBM->XML
converter (I *think* someone already mentioned that).

And do we REALLY want to use GNOME?  That will lock people into using
the GNOME panel, and now that Qt is open source, it's uncertain that
GNOME will be the standard.  (Personally, I'm all for both - there needs
to be good competition, and even Qt's new license is somewhat less than
100% ideal.)

But this kind of thing can probably be done well just using the Tk or
GTK widgets, then exec-ing the educational programs.  We should also
look at programs that will be dependent on edulp - what will be best for
them?  As it is, the only thing they have to do is read arguments and
re-exec edulp when they're done, passing the completed level as an
argument.  Would that be more efficient if we used a GNOME panel
widget?  Would that lock out educational programs that wanted to use
KDE/Qt?

Just some more random thoughts,
Micah