Opinions on converting Pallet to using the command line, versus Tcl bindings

[Joshua Root]

On 2015-6-19 09:56 , Kyle Sammons wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> It's reaching the point in my project where I have everything running,
> save the core functionality, which hasn't been updated/modernized yet.
> Currently Pallet uses Tcl bindings for Objective-C to issue commands and
> communicate with Macports, rather than simply piping input/output
> to/from the command line. But, because Pallet is rather old, it still
> uses the system version of Tcl, rather than the Macports specific
> version of Tcl, meaning that currently it can't actually communicate
> with Macports. 

That really shouldn't be hard to fix.

> So, I'm left at the decision to either try to link the two together and
> continue development of Pallet the way it's been going, or, to scratch
> it and convert it to just simply issuing commands and parsing output. So
> I was hoping to get the opinions from the community, seeing as this is a
> community application. :)
> 
> The pro's for converting to a CLI/GUI application that I can think of;
> 
> Pros:
> -More future proof. Literally anything can change on the backend as long
> as the commands remain the same. 

The CLI output has probably changed more than the API in the past.

> -Smaller code base. The current code base is fairly large, and
> converting it to a CLI/GUI application would significantly shorten it. 

This probably points to duplication of functionality between port.tcl
and Pallet. That would be better solved by sharing of code, perhaps in a
new front-end support library module.

> -Future commands would be easier to implement.

Not really, parsing some arbitrary text is not easier than adding
another procedure to the bindings.

Other cons:
No progress callbacks
No interactive prompt callbacks
No separation of error/warning/info/msg output streams
No ability to implement features that the CLI doesn't have
Worse performance

- Josh