[tex-live] tl17 pretest init

[Philip Taylor]

Adam/Mojca/Norbert --
> On 19 April 2017 at 15:08, Norbert Preining wrote:
>> Hi Phi,
>>
>>> If the front end were written in a language in which I felt confident, I would be more than happy so to do.  But if you can point me to the Apple Macintosh / UX front-end, I might feel inspired to try ...
>> You can choose whatever language is fine for you.
>> Adam wrote TLU in ObjC (AFAIK).
> I have to add that Norbert just wrote "new bindings" that makes it
> hundred times easier to do so.
OK, may I ask how one learns what those "new bindings" are and where to find them (and their documentation) ?
>
> For the TeX Live Utility for Mac OS X see:
>     http://amaxwell.github.io/tlutility/
>     https://github.com/amaxwell/tlutility
>
> Those sources are not yet using the new interface.
The first link I completely failed to understand (well, the contents thereof, I mean); the second seemed clear enough but appeared to require the use of "git" (which I don't have, and with which I am completely unfamiliar) in order to find the sources.  But on reading the prose it would seem that in order to replicate Maxwell's work for Microsoft Windows one has to be familiar with Windows GUI programming, which I am not.  The most portable interface would, I suspect, take the form of a locally-served web page, but because a browser runs in a secure sandbox I cannot see how it could trigger the appropriate actions in the command-line installer unless there were also a local ASP.NET server.  So for the moment at least I am stymied.

> Yes, Objective C and C, so none of it will be useful
> for Windows. I suggest making a native Windows app
> so that users get the look and feel to which they're
> accustomed:
>
> https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/uploads/2006/02/6a0120a85dcdae970b0120a86d6311970b-pi.png
I could not see what point was being made there.  Presumably that was a screen-shot of Microsoft Word 2003 with all toolbars displayed concurrently, but in real life one exposes toolbars only selectively, so apart from demonstrating what all toolbars displayed concurrently would look like, what was the reader intended to infer ?  At least in Word 2003 one /could/ expose the necessary-and-sufficient set of toolbars for the task(s) in hand; in more recent versions, that fundamental requirement has been tacitly jettisoned and replaced with a distinctly user-unfriendly  so-called "ribbon" interface in which one has to continually re-select orthogonal ribbons in order to accomplish even the simplest set of tasks.

** Phil.