On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 11:51:30AM -0500, Bob Kryger wrote:
> I never use the GUIs. I don't feel that, in general, they give you the
> functions and control you need. Nor is using a GUI good for learning
> what is really going on in the system, and how to properly and
> effectively admin a system.
I am aghast that we have gone backwards from AIX "smit" and Linuxconf
in earlier (Red Hat!) distros. A GUI configuration tool should:
1. Have a command line interface.
2. Generate a script log that shows the exact commands required
to reproduce the changes, and can be massaged through light editing
to abstract it. [By "exact" I mean, restore your system to the
snapshot taken before running the tool, run the script through
the command-line interface, and it should reproduce the exact
same result.]
3. Provide an optional list of every configuration file that has
been touched by an operation.
4. Integrate with a revision control system, so that the
history of configuration changes is recorded somewhere.
...
This is not rocket science at all(*), but unfortunately people who are
"good" GUI developers never grokked Unix (or Plan 9!), and think that
the whole world is a single !@#$% desktop machine. So we get Windows
95 running over a POSIX core. Lovely. :-(
Please, someone prove me wrong! Point me to an active project that
aims to satisfy any of the above criteria; I'm not out there actively
looking, so perhaps such a beast exists.
-Bill
(*) The "rocket science" is in having applications respond to dynamic
updates, using, e.g., Gconf. I grant that this is an order-of-magnitude
more difficult.
