Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 00:28:59 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Giao Nguyen <grail@functional.com> Cc: Wes Peters <softweyr@xmission.com>, Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: DNS vs. GUI? (was: Microsoft brainrot...) Message-ID: <29270.875431739@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 28 Sep 1997 05:36:55 -0000." <19970928053655.29651@functional.com>
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> I don't want to sound like an HCI weenie because I'm not. HOWEVER, the > closer you bring these two things together the better life will be. I > for one, would *love* to see GUI utilities for administration of FreeBSD > boxes out there. Would I use it? Not unless I had too. These tools > should exist for those who are new to get up to speed, not meant as > *the* interface for the guru's to use. We can finally get rid of that > ridiculous argument of "Windows makes it so much easier ... " And I don't think that anyone here would argue with that essential sentiment. As several people have already noted, this entire discussion is really nothing new. The general topic of "how to put a friendly face on UNIX for beginners" has been a topic of considerable debate for almost as long as UNIX has been around. They were certainly discussing it in 1982, when I first encountered UNIX, and I'm almost certain that people occasionally came into Ken's office at Bell Labs and made whiny comments about his poor choices of command names even earlier than that. :-) It always comes down to the technology, basically, and no one can quite seem to agree on the right framework for this or even where to put the scaffolding. Some would argue, for example, that all the relevant UNIX commands should be taught to understand certain standardized command-line arguments, like "--describe-yourself" or "--use-front-end". Your front-end mechanics are correspondingly simplified since all the subsystems you need to talk to know how to deal with the concept of an abstract user interface and life is generally good for the naive user. Another school of thought thinks that the first idea is absolutely stupid and that you should have an interface layer instead which acts as a "shim" between some funky UNIX utility and it's arcane specialized configuration files and your UI, providing a much more abstract interface to the front-end code. Yet another school of thought thinks the first two groups must be smoking hashish since nobody in their right minds would attempt to unify such a wide range of dissimilar utilities that way and trying to wallpaper a 60ft oak tree would make as much sense. Only a unified configuration database which all utilities respect will do the job. To further complicate matters, you also have numerous failures at this littering the landscape, putting the fear of god into those last few souls who would dare to tread the same minefields. Unixware, SCO, AIX, HP/UX - all have had "GUI administration tools" which either sucked beyond measure or have only just recently subsided to suction levels considered tolerable by their users. I've also played with what some of the Linux distributions have come up with so far and, frankly, they all have a whole long way left to go too. It's an not easy one, "this little task." So, now that I've totally demoralized you on this topic, let me try and give you some idea as to where we might still go from here. :-) Mike Smith has done some pretty nifty unifying work on his "Juliet" utility - essentially a "meta-configuration server" which will supply a local or remote machine with a nice, unified picture of various bits of system data such as the contents of /etc/resolv.conf or /etc/rc.conf. Juliet views such icky "real world" files very abstractly, importing and exporting their contents through handlers which can be dynamically loaded into Juliet, potentially teaching it about new configuration files on the fly (want to have your Samba server configurable via Juliet? Just write an appropriate handler for smb.conf files and register the properties appropriately so that they're visible (I'm also hoping that I'm not massacring this description too badly and, if so, that Mike will correct me :-). This is a good example of the kind of relevant technology which could be taken into very interesting directions if only someone would perhaps *comment* on it one of these times when Mike asks (again) for feedback. ;) Sometimes even having the technology isn't enough (though it sure helps), you also need to have the will to use it! Check out: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/mailing-lists/archive/1997/freebsd-config/* For more discussion on this tool and some of the ramifications of its use. I believe there's also a pointer to the actual sources for it somewhere in there. :-) Another interesting area of exploration is the WEB based approach, some of which has already been done in prototype form by Wouter de Boer of Holland - he calls it "FreEasy" and, while it's certainly not finished or all that secure to use (it requires that a copy of the Apache web server run as root, probably not a popular scenario with most admins! :), it's certainly an interesting look at what is possible and perhaps can provide inspiration for other efforts. There's a copy sitting in ftp://hub.freebsd.org/incoming/FreEasy-0.2.tar.gz which should be reasonably up-to-date. Someone also recently posted something to freebsd-isp talking about an "ISP box of choice" or some such which seemed to have as its software goals something along much the same lines - an HTML front-end to just about everything useful - and they're certainly not the only ones to contemplate this. So I guess it really comes down to in the end is this: What do we have the will to do and what practical (e.g. existing or truly implementable) technologies can we use to do it with? Answer those two questions and you'll accomplish far more than a simple re-hash of the whole GUI-for-UNIX debate which we've had at least 50 times in these FreeBSD mailing lists. ;-) Jordan
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