Support urwid? / Is there a pure-python dialog utility

[frougon]

Support urwid? / Is there a pure-python dialog utility

[frougon]

Hello,

Concerning the mention of "dialog-like" backends, pythondialog supports any program that is dialog-compatible (there is a keyword argument in the Dialog constructor to specify the executable). In the past, Xdialog used to be mostly dialog-compatible and was supported. Then divergences became too important between the two backend interfaces (APIs) and this support was dropped.

Regarding using urwid as a pure-Python backend, you could investigate it as an independent project, but for the time being, I'm sad to say I won't be able to do such investigation, much less the subsequent coding work. Besides, I fear that merging this into pythondialog along with the current dialog-backend support would be very uncomfortable and ugly. A separate project could keep a compatible API, though, if urwid satisfies the needs.

Regards

[ztane]

For my immediate needs I wrote a piece of Python code that can figure out how to install dialog the original on the user's computer.

[frougon]

Okay... good for you, but I'm not sure I can do much about the "issue", then. If you think your script is very useful and clean enough, it might be included in a contrib directory along with a suitable README.txt. But I'm concerned about shipping a script that automatically downloads and installs stuff using the HTTP protocol. Or is it better than that? Maybe you are using an internal mirror? Anyway, the README.txt would serve to warn users about these kinds of possible issues.

Concerning the addition of a backend that is very very far from being dialog-compatible (e.g., urwid), as said I think it falls out of the scope of pythondialog (but could be a separate project); and unfortunately, I won't work myself on such a think in the foreseeable future.

To be clear: if there were a well-working, 100% compatible replacement of the dialog backend using a pure-Python library that is easy to install, in principle I think it could be considered, with the idea of replacing the dialog backend. What I want to avoid is to have to monitor and update interface code with several backends, because that's annoying and error-prone.

Regards