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The luxury of ignorance: A follow-up (NewsForge)The luxury of ignorance: A follow-up (NewsForge)Posted Mar 2, 2004 16:24 UTC (Tue) by frazier (subscriber, #3060)In reply to: The luxury of ignorance: A follow-up (NewsForge) by evgeny Parent article: The luxury of ignorance: A follow-up (NewsForge)
wrongly thought-out GUIs for admin tasks is just one of many problems plaguing the FLOSS development; I can rant for hours regarding the pathetic absense of a general-purpose configuration API, for example).Yeah, I spent some time thinking about this problem recently. My incomplete thoughts are here under "Thoughts on GUI system administration, both locally and remotely": http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Brock_Frazier "Configuration: A single point-of-contact for system configuration" is the most recent in there, and /ThinServerUI is out of date since it didn't take into account the "Configuration" library and is overly web-centric. ...and there's an overview of different UIs for the same tasks at different times here. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'd be very happy to work on the UI ends of this, but I don't recommend me writing (ugly) code for anything of this magnitude. There's supposed to be something called debconf out there that tries to accomplish something along the lines of what Configuration would do. All I know is I'm the sort of user who would gretly benefit from something like Configuration and the associated control GUIs but am not the guy to implement it, unfortuntely.
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The luxury of ignorance: A follow-up (NewsForge) Posted Mar 3, 2004 9:03 UTC (Wed) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] I believe the real problem is not a GUI, but the principal lack of a unified way of storing/quering configuration parameters. Creating a layer _above_ the existing thousand and one configuration approaches/formats (like what Webmin is doing) is a dead end. We have to build a new, powerful configuration library (with C API, no dependencies except libc, and bindings to all reasonable scriptable languages including /bin/sh) and rewrite existing apps to use it. This seems a long way, but only this will do in the long run. Even a trivial .ini-style configuration API, if existed in libc, would have saved uncountable thousands of work hours - both of programmers and users. If there wouldn't be malloc() & friends in libc, each application would have to implement it. Thanks God, designers of libc thought of the memory allocation issues. But for 20+ years, the Unix world seems to fail realizing a unified approach to the configuration stuff is important as well.The Gnome's gconf is something very close to what I'd like to see - EXCEPT its huge list of dependencies, rendering it useless for anything basic like system configuration.
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