[Nix-dev] NixOS: Graphical User Interface

[Nicolas Pierron]

Hi,

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:36, Eelco Dolstra <e.dolstra at tudelft.nl> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 04/24/2011 08:14 PM, Nicolas Pierron wrote:
>
>> I don't know how many of you ever encounter the directory named gui in
>> the source tree of NixOS ...  So I am pleased to announce the first
>> graphical tool (at least introduced on this mailing list) to watch for
>> NixOS options.
>>
>> http://nbp.name/img/nixos-gui.png
>
> Cool :-)

This is the goal ;-)

>> The current usage of this tool is to explore options, and see the
>> current value, the default value, the example, the description, where
>> the option is declared and where it is defined.  It is based on
>> nixos-option tool which fetch the information out of NixOS
>> configurations and output a XML which is then interpreted by nixos-gui
>> to display the option tree.  It load options in a lazy fashion
>> otherwise loading all options would take too much time and resources
>> to make it usable.
>
> Wouldn't it actually be faster to load them all at the same time?  Now it
> takes a second or two to click on an option, while evaluating *all* the
> options and dumping them to XML shouldn't take much longer.

I did it that first, but dumping all options into an xml file take a
lot of time and produce a huge XML file.  This could hardly be used
with an interactive manner.  In addition, this caused huge memory
consumption when loading it.  May be we should try that again with the
new xml format.

The last version should be a little faster because it only relies on
one shell script call per option instead of multiple one to get
details of each options.

>> - Make an edit option to modify the content of $NIXOS_CONFIG.
>
> That would be really nice.

When I have a tool to do that on the command line the interface would
be pretty easy.

-- 
Nicolas Pierron
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolasbpierron - http://nbp.name/