UI Backend API for 2.0

[Stephane Peter]

I'm writing a draft for the new API to write UI Backend modules in the
next version of setup. Here is what I have so far (see header file
attached).

This pretty much comes down to abstracting down the pieces of GUI
toolkit (GTK in this case) that we would need to recreate the dialogs in
the current installer. Doing it this way would allow it to be separate
from setup itself (say in a separate library shared with the other
loki_* tools), but it has the downside of significantly complicating the
console back-end to transform the description of a dialog into
essentially a series of sequential questions.

I'm thinking in the latter case we may want to drop it in favor of the
dialog-based one. This one would also need a lot of work though, to
support custom dialogs instead of the few ones part of the dialog
distribution. Maybe we would then switch to another text-based UI
library (I know there is at least a couple out there, forgot their
name).

Now that I think about it, I forgot to add the necessary things to
support progress bars in this version...  Please ignore that ;)
I also don't have a way to specify the location of a .glade (or similar)
file, if we intend to still have that in the next version.

Comments ?
-- 
Stephane Peter
Sr. Software Engineer
Codehost, Inc.
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