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frougon / pythondialog

Python wrapper for the Unix "dialog" utility
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
25 stars 8 forks source link

Support urwid? / Is there a pure-python dialog utility #4

Open ztane opened 6 years ago

ztane commented 6 years ago

I'd like to have the menuconfig-like interface in a pure python utility. It seems that the urwid library has some half-baked dialog.py in its examples - I wonder if this could be baked in into the lib so that no external exe would need to be called if urwid exists;

or, pythondialog speaks of "dialog-like" backends; are you aware of any that would be pure python or at least installable on Linux / Mac with pip?

frougon commented 6 years ago

Hello,

Concerning the mention of "dialog-like" backends, pythondialog supports any program that is dialog-compatible (there is a keyword argument in the Dialog constructor to specify the executable). In the past, Xdialog used to be mostly dialog-compatible and was supported. Then divergences became too important between the two backend interfaces (APIs) and this support was dropped.

Regarding using urwid as a pure-Python backend, you could investigate it as an independent project, but for the time being, I'm sad to say I won't be able to do such investigation, much less the subsequent coding work. Besides, I fear that merging this into pythondialog along with the current dialog-backend support would be very uncomfortable and ugly. A separate project could keep a compatible API, though, if urwid satisfies the needs.

Regards

ztane commented 6 years ago

For my immediate needs I wrote a piece of Python code that can figure out how to install dialog the original on the user's computer.

frougon commented 6 years ago

Okay... good for you, but I'm not sure I can do much about the "issue", then. If you think your script is very useful and clean enough, it might be included in a contrib directory along with a suitable README.txt. But I'm concerned about shipping a script that automatically downloads and installs stuff using the HTTP protocol. Or is it better than that? Maybe you are using an internal mirror? Anyway, the README.txt would serve to warn users about these kinds of possible issues.

Concerning the addition of a backend that is very very far from being dialog-compatible (e.g., urwid), as said I think it falls out of the scope of pythondialog (but could be a separate project); and unfortunately, I won't work myself on such a think in the foreseeable future.

To be clear: if there were a well-working, 100% compatible replacement of the dialog backend using a pure-Python library that is easy to install, in principle I think it could be considered, with the idea of replacing the dialog backend. What I want to avoid is to have to monitor and update interface code with several backends, because that's annoying and error-prone.

Regards