[maemo-community] Command line apps & Extras

[From: Andrew Flegg]

2009/11/26 Lucas Maneos <maemo at subs.maneos.org>:
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:24:02PM +0000, Valerio Valerio wrote:
>
>> - For some CLI apps (mc,pico,nano,htop,etc) you can actually create a
>> desktop file that launches app inside an xterm. Can we generate such
>> files effectively making apps desktop-based?
>
> For some it's an option (though I personally think the vim launcher is
> next to useless[...]

Don't hold back, tell me what you really think!

> and I'm not convinced that cluttering the already
> dysfunctional app launcher with more icons is the greatest idea in
> general), but it doesn't make sense for daemons that are meant to be
> running all the time or programs that expect arguments on the command
> line like wget, socat or ssh.

Absolutely, there's a difference between the following:

  1) Apps which can be run without any further argument (top, vim)
  2) Apps which need arguments or are used in pipes (socat, netcat,
     awk, sed, Perl, Python)
  3) Daemons which run at start up and don't open security holes,
     destroy battery or make the user unaware of their function
     (sshd)
  4) Daemons which can be started and stopped using the menu,
     Settings or status menu (x11vnc does this?)
  5) Daemons which *could* be started and stopped via the UI,
     but aren't.

I think each of these types of apps needs to be considered separately.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/