GTKtrue -- The only GUI to /bin/true that fits your needs.

Description

This is actually the third release of GTKtrue - your one in all GUI to /bin/true. How long have you not been waiting for this update? Now at long last it is finally here and with it follows, as usual, an era of true graphical interface domination. Soon there will be no more confusing shell or awk scripting, only GUI's as far as the eye can see.

Information

In all honesty, I have to divulge some piece of information to you. This program might at first seem extremely serious, but I can assure you it is not! All of this originally spurs from a discussion in <nntp://mdh.chat> at the University of Mälardalen in Västerås between Anders Carlsson, Peter Karlsson and myself.
Anders told me that he had been talking in LysKOM with some people about the increase in really, as he thought, stupid applications popping up at Freshmeat lately. Applications based on the popular GTK+ widget set. He suggested, as a joke, that someone should make a GTK interface to /bin/true, a GTKtrue, and he got a few answers suggesting a couple of neat designs:

+-------------------------+      +------------------------+
|    What shall it be?    |      |                        |
|                         |      |    It is true.         |
|  |[ True ]|  [ False ]  |      |                        |
+-------------------------+      |             |[  OK  ]| |
                                 +------------------------+

Of course I felt I just had to do it! The temptation was too big and since I used Glade I really did not have to spend any time at all writing code. I just sat down and dragged and dropped for a while after deciding to implement the rightmost since it was the most true of the two. True to the original meaning of /bin/true and also more semantically true. The left one is clearly tantalizing and very neat and perhaps a future release with a compile-time option to build the left one will happen, but do not count on it! :-) There will NOT be a GTKfalse. At least am I not going to implement it, but if there is anyone out there who would like to patch GTKtrue to include or pass for a GTKfalse - hey, it is your life! :-) However, there actually does exist a "port" of GTKtrue to GNUStep. It is called STEPtrue and the first version, courtesy of rhodie, can be downloaded from the same location as this package. (See below for LINKS)

Dependencies

See the file DEPENDS located in the base directory of GTKtrue.

Platforms

I first built this program using Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 on a Cyrix 6x86 166+. Now I am using Mandrake Linux 6.1 since my SCSI tape drive decided it liked Mandrake better, this will of course change again soon in a not so distant future when the next release of Debian hits my local mirror. I have no clue as to if it runs or even compiles on anything else. :P

Languages

This program uses the GNU gettext library to look up the correct language strings to be used in different settings. If you are interested in writing your own language file you can start out by reading the TeX-info pages on gettext (i.e. "info gettext").
Currently this program has support for English, Swedish, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Slovak and Finnish. Some of them have been translated using Babelfish so maybe they are not so good or correct?

The language files are located in the po/ subdirectory in the distribution. Grab the file "gtrue.pot" and copy it to your language file, e.g. "sv.po" if you are in Sweden. Now translate the appropriate texts within double quotes to your language as you see fit.

When you are ready and want to try it out update the "ALL_LINGUAS" field in the file configure.in located in the base directory of the distribution.

ALL_LINGUAS="sv you_language "

Now you have to update all the Makefiles so that the new binary being built is made aware of your new translation. This is accomplished through the use of the autogen.sh script, you can see it as a parent to the configure script. It regenerates the configure script and then runs it, so all your favorite extra parameters you usually give to configure you simply give to autogen.sh, such as --prefix=/opt etc. - that is it!

If you have problems in getting this to work I can only give you the following pieces of advice:

Check your LANG environment variable, and maybe even LC_TYPE and LC_ALL.
Also check if you have the LINGUAS variable set in your environment. In the Mandrake distribution this seems to be a policy.
Make sure you have named the .po-file correctly for your country, information on naming conventions are listed in the gettext info file, see "info gettext" for more information.
If autogen.sh fails it is probably because you miss some development packages, like gettext, autoconf, automake or something else.
If you really do not care any more, send me the translations and tell me for what country it is viable and I will try to upload a new version as soon as possible. :)

Installation

See the file INSTALL located in the base directory of GTKtrue.

If nothing works you could try running ./autogen.sh by calling it as follows from the base directory of GTKtrue:

$ rm -f config.cache; ./autogen.sh --prefix=/your/prefix

After that you simply type the following as usual:

$ make clean all install

Remember that the install phase of make needs to have write permission to the prefix:ed directory that you gave during the configure or autogen.sh part. So if you want to install gtrue to /usr/local/bin your prefix is /usr/local and you will probably have to be root to write to that directory.

Thanks

Big thanks goes out to all the people who have made translations and who have sent me encouraging mails inspiring me to actually continue with this rather insane project.
A special "thank you" to Juhapekka Tolvanen who reminded me of the whole project by sending me an email in the middle of the some school work of the last days of late summer when all the leaves still had not yet fallen and my server had been down since mid summer. You might not have noticed from my reply at the time, but you woke up a sleeping daemon. :-)

Continuance

As of now I am considering leaving GTKtrue where it belongs, on some forgotten server somewhere far away where I will not see it again as long as I shall live.
It has been fun, GTKtrue has actually become my very simple extended version of "Hello World". It contains simple command line argument parsing using popt, project outline and maintenance using autoconf, automake and i18n (there is a reason for not writing "internationalization" ;), etc. But the time has come to move on to greater heights and new achievements.

Author

See the file AUTHORS located in the base directory of GTKtrue.

Disclaimer

Please do not bother the author with stupid questions concerning future updates, fixes or serious allegations due to any kind of problem that running this application could possibly cause. The author is NOT liable to any damages to data, stability, security or the death of your beloved pet due to too much time being spent in front of your Linux box glaring over this great program. The software is supplied AS IS and is only intended as a harmless practical joke.
The code and everything in the distribution is under the GPL. Enjoy!

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Links

Here are some links to the above mentioned and unmentioned people, organizations and social institutions listed in no particular order what so ever:

The GTKtrue home page

http://www.mds.mdh.se/~dat95jnn/linux/gtrue/ Freshmeat

http://freshmeat.net/
The University of Mälardalen, MdH

http://www.mdh.se/
The student body, Mälardalens Studentkår - MdS at MdH

http://www.mds.mdh.se/
Studentdatorutskottet, a part of MdS.

http://www.mds.mdh.se/sdu.v/ LysKOM

http://www.lysator.liu.se/lyskom/ GTK+

http://www.gtk.org/
Glade

http://glade.pn.org/
Babelfish

http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/