Re:Using Gooey as a Universal Front End for Any Language or ...
by eukaryote31 on Sunday September 22, 2019 @08:10PM
(#21044900)
Barring that, a community-curated repo of interfaces for common applications would also be great. You could just have a wrapper that automatically downloads the applicable config files on the fly.
Re:Using Gooey as a Universal Front End for Any Language or ...
by TylerE on Sunday September 22, 2019 @06:33PM
(#21044407)
I can’t see how that would handle any of the hard bits (like dependencies between arguments, mutual exclusion)...
Re:Using Gooey as a Universal Front End for Any Language or ...
by gojomo on Sunday September 22, 2019 @07:15PM
(#21044606)
To the extent the command-line program returns proper exit codes, or gives other hints via its output/side-effects as to whether it did anything useful, I could see it working up-to-a-point.
Discovering exclusive options, or options that must be specified together, sound like exactly the sorts of things it could deduce, when every invocation with/without certain pairs of options fails.
Perhaps wrapper-utilities like 'Gooey' or some sort of automated-probing could encourage a greater formalization for specifying de-facto command-line APIs. Then, command-line programs might want to offer not just the human-interpretable help texts and docs, but more rigorous usage-specs that could drive automatic wrappers.
Re:Using Gooey as a Universal Front End for Any Language or ...
by TylerE on Sunday September 22, 2019 @09:07PM
(#21045159)
Probing at options sounds dangerous. There is no guarantee at all that attempted invocations won't change state.
Re:Using Gooey as a Universal Front End for Any Language or ...
by sunebeck on Sunday September 22, 2019 @09:34PM
(#21045247)
I wouldn't wanna let it probe 'rm' :D
Perhaps the probing could happen in a VM / container image which would reset after each invocation.
Re:Using Gooey as a Universal Front End for Any Language or ...
by gojomo on Monday September 23, 2019 @02:11PM
(#21051709)
You'd of course do it inside a controlled environment, via virtualization or similar technologies which let you monitor, veto, or roll-back anything the analyzed program does. (And if it's malicious/sneaky enough to escape that, then it wasn't safe to use in a manual fashion, either.)
Re:Using Gooey as a Universal Front End for Any Language or ...
by proc0 on Sunday September 22, 2019 @10:13PM
(#21045425)
Someone above posted this: https://github.com/google/python-fire
seems you could generate something with fire tool and then parse it dynamically with Gooey.
Some type of crawler would interact with a program, parse its --help output, man page, or any other info available, to enumerate all possible options and their formatting.
It sounds like a really messy program considering how inconsistent CLI's are.
Anyways, a GUI could help massively with discoverability.
Such a tool could help bridge the gap a little between GUI and CLI.