Some idle comments about Linus' e-mail response and Linux

Posted Mar 8, 2007 23:49 UTC (Thu) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]

He doesn't ask for a GUI front-end slapped on top of a command line interface, he asks for programs that have both both kinds fully functional. And preferably the GUI version prints out the command with options what would do the same action as the GUI action just performed.

Good taste is to write your programs in a modular fashion so that slapping different kinds of interfaces on top of it is peanuts, no matter if yourself are only interested in one.

This makes it also easier to write KDE/Gnome/Qt/GTK/FLTK/ncurses versions of GUIs, as not everyone wants to install all existing kitchen sinks just to run a single application. And you know what, it makes it much easier to port such programs to different environments much easier. 3D OpenGL GUI, or a low resources embedded device: Same code, only different GUI, your program shouldn't care.

Other good taste is to dynamically load needed libraries when you need them, instead of creating a dependency hell of mostly unused libs, which cause programs to fail starting up when they miss. Compile options are NOT an option: Distro's will just enable them all, just in case.