On Sat, 22 Sep 2007 14:14:17 +0930, Tim wrote: > On Fri, 2007-09-21 at 15:18 +0000, Beartooth wrote: >> Suggestion : persuade the SELinux developers, if you can, to go take >> lessons from the ZoneAlarm people, paying heavily enough to get eager >> co-operation. ZA is by no means perfect -- it too can be obscure -- but >> on any scale of user-friendliness, it's orders of magnitude (plural!) >> ahead of the SELinux messages. > > Oh please, no! That software is crap, both the design and operation of > it. It does seriously bugger up the normal operation of many computers. > It interferes with things in a way that they were never designed for. It > has an interface that can lock you out of a system asking you to okay > something, when the interface is not currently accessible, and there's > no way to get to the interface. > > SELinux, on the other hand, is a system that a developer can work with > if they bother to take their thumb out of their arse. I can't speak to that, nor ever have been able to, even in the bad old days of W98, and wasn't trying to. My point relates entirely to ZA's user interface : when it notifies me of something, I can usually understand what. The opposite is true of SELinux. As in any serious writing, it's a question of audience. SELinux being new, the developers seem to write almost entirely for their own kind; and being great Alpha Plus Technoids, have long since lost any recollection of what it's like not to have any expertise on their subject. The same thing happens to all of us; the solution is to go back and learn, from real newbies, what assumptions to base your mental picture of your audience (or your outer audience) on. I'm sure some of them will do that, one of these days. To repeat, I am emphatically *not* urging that the *code* in SELinux take lessons from ZA, but only that the technical writers who put the end user feedback into plain English do so. -- Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.
