wkitty42 wrote in Mon Sep 03, 2018 6:54 pm:disabling Qt may also affect the in-sim Aircraft Center... there are instructions somewhere (wiki?) on what to change in the sources to use the old Aircraft Center if it is desired in one's FG... it is only a coupld of lines, IIRC...
Yes, that's absolutely correct, even though I don't think I added those instructions to the wiki, but there should be a corresponding forum topic, it's a fairly simple change actually only involving a few lines of Nasal code.
As far as I know, the real issue however is that I don't think the package manager stuff received much/any testing by people not using Qt-enabled builds, so there may be plenty of issues that we are unaware of, because the original "Aircraft Center" simply got phased out when the Qt launcher got added.
Originally, the plans announced on the devel list/forum (respectively) stated that the new UI would use a common service layer back-end that could also be used by other front-ends, including Phi, but I am not sure how much of this ever materialized or not - quoting FlightGear core developer Torsten:
New Canvas GUITorsten wrote:There is currently heavy activity towards a new UI. There will be the HTML5 based version, I am currently working on and an internal implementation based on well supported libraries. Most likely, both will use a common service layer to provide necessary data.
Neither of those will use Nasal or Canvas to render the UI elements.
Torsten
In other words, I am not sure if it's even supposed to be possible to use a non-Qt enabled build (e.g. via Phi) to download/install and manage aircraft/scenery or not ?
Then again, technically there is really no reason why the same back-end could not be exposed via a CLI (Command Line Interface) so that non-Qt5 builds/users can still make use of the package manager back-end, especially if everything works through fgcommands - besides, this could be a great asset from a troubleshooting standpoint, i.e. people could run all sorts of tests in a scripted fashion to see if their aircraft can be easily downloaded/installed and configured, without requiring an interactive UI.
This could work analogous to the package manager on any modern Linux distro.
EDIT: The instructions on re-enabling the original Nasal/Canvas based Aircraft Center are to be found here:
Subject: Reinstating Canvas based Aircraft Center for non Qt builds