In general a nice idea and I agree. Especially w/ the GUI builders and the single user/desktop centered interfaces of many GUIs. I did get a kick out of the smit 'running man' especially when he fell on his face. Frankly I only used smit for the first time i needed to do something or for infrequent tasks that i could not remember the command for. bob Bill Rugolsky Jr. wrote: >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. > > >
