Jeff Lawson (aka 'Bovine') van Distributed.net heeft een .plan update gepost met info over de verdwijning van de RC5 Win32 GUI client. Nieuwe leden van de Dutch Power Cows zullen gemerkt hebben dat de huidige clients alleen via een command line interface geconfigureerd kunnen worden, en dat gaat iets lastiger dan via een GUItje. Hier heb je de info uit de .plan file:
As some of you have noticed, the classic "win32gui" clients have recently been removed from the clients.html and select.cgi link pages. The separate "GUI" client was originally deemed necessary because the only alternative was a console-based version that had a number of significant limitations:- required significant user involvement for installation.
- no user interface for client configuration.
- could not be used in environments needing an unobtrusive, hidden mode of operation that did not interrupt normal logouts
- inability to minimize to the system tray
- no extras, such as "moo sounds" or "log graphing" or pretty percentage bars.HOW IT WAS
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We have maintained separate releases of both the GUI and CLI Win32 clients for quite awhile now, with our client development focused around the common CLI-based source code, and the GUI client involving a fair amount of clever wrappers around it. Although this made development of the separate versions easier than they would have been otherwise, there was always a significant delay in the release of the Win32GUI relative to the equivalent Win32CLI. Additionally, the GUI client has always suffered from numerous obscure operational bugs ranging from benign to severe issues.[...] WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW
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A new "self-installer" version of the Win32CLI will now be available for download to make installations simplified. This installer is nearly identical to the installer that the Win32GUI came packaged in. Significant effort has been put into making "upgrading" from a prior Win32GUI installation easy.[...] THE FUTURE
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It had always been part of our plans to try to slowly move away from producing a separate GUI and CLI versions. This included the Win32GUI and Win32CLI, the MacOS GUI and FBA clients, OS/2 GUI and CLI clients, RiscOS GUI and CLI, and possible X11/Gnome/etc-based clients. Instead, we planned to create "detached" front-end GUI applications that could be run alongside the traditional CLI clients. This would prevent the complexity of various OS-specific GUI programming requirements from affect the design of the common client source pool. Additionally, this detached mechanism might allow for remote configuration and monitoring to occur over a local network, which has always been a popularly requested feature for our clients.So with all of this said, we will now be diverting our efforts from attempting to maintain separate GUI-specific versions of our clients and toward achieving our separated GUI frontend and CLI back-end model. We are beginning development of an extensible communications interface that will allow multi-platform GUI configuration utilities to be constructed and arbitrarily configure and monitor remote or local clients. The projected availablilty of these new clients cannot be easily estimated at this time, though we will definitely make future announcements when further information is known.
Wat er dus basicly gaat gebeuren is dat het hoofd losgerukt gaat worden van de koe, zodat je het achterwerk van de koe kunt updaten zonder er een heel nieuw hoofd voor te moeten ontwerpen...of zoiets .