Re: [MiNT] Re[2]: GEM boost

[Mark Duckworth <mduckworth@atari-source.com>]

On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 14:14 -0600, evan@coolrunningconcepts.com wrote:

> Not what I was talking about, but you are correct that these are functionally
> the same.
> 
> What if the desktop routed stdin/stdout to a pipe for ALL programs, no 
> matter if
> they were TOS or PRG or whatever.   If at any time, the newly launched program
> writes to this pipe, then open a new window at that time to display the text.
> This stops poorly written GEM programs from destroying your screen with a
> console write, and makes DEBUG output much simpler (no cout library needed).
> Also .TOS and .PRG no longer have to be different.  Instead of just running a
> shell, you could run any program directly - say double click on telnet and a
> window will open as soon as it writes it's "telnet>" prompt.
> 
> You could even catch "Usage:" messages and pop up a .TTP box of sorts, 
> possibly
> by passing --help to the program and catching the results into a GEM dialog to
> make passing of parameters simple an intuitive.

I think this is a lot of work for little reason.  I think that once the
desktop starts, output should be redirected to a file, or otherwise
redirected to /dev/null.  there should be no way an app can write all
over the screen.  I always thought that was so ghetto that every desktop
allowed that.  Must be something hard to redirect or something.  You
don't ever see console crap writing all over X because someone
accidentally forgot to redirect output elsewhere.  MiNT offers the
functionality that I'm looking for but I think there was an issue with
it, like I couldn't login or something ;-)

Mark