Date: Wed, 5 Jun 1996 15:36:34 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: editors Message-ID: <Pine.AUX.3.91.960605152527.25391A-100000@covina.lightside.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.93.960605164717.422r-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu>
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On Wed, 5 Jun 1996, John Fieber wrote: > [cc list trimed, moved to chat, the proper location to bat aronud > embryonic ideas.] Guess I should subscribe to chat. Or at least don't drop me from the cc list! > On Wed, 5 Jun 1996, Jake Hamby wrote: > > > would be a modular installation/admin/tutorial/monitoring type tool, that > > would be somewhat like training wheels: You would have tutorials (or > > dare I say "wizards" :-) to help you out when you are still learning (you > > ask it, "How do I create a new account?" or whatever), but on the other > > Lets not call them wizards. I think "Guru" is a little more in > line with the unix tradition. Anyway, what the wizards amount to > is a fusion of documentation and functionality. First there were > racks of manuals in the other room. Then there were manuals > portable enough to have on your own shelf, then we had online > documentation, then programs with context sensitive help, and now > we have a fusion of the help and the program. Actually, I thought of "Guru" last night, but your talk of "wizards" made me forget. I even thought of an animation to go with it, a little guru (maybe the BSD daemon sitting in the lotus position? :-) with the caption "Guru Meditation" while it's working. Of course if you never owned an Amiga computer, you wouldn't get the inside joke, but cool nonetheless. :-) > Another way to look at it is "Just In Time > Documentation"---documentation delivered to your screen at > precicely the moment you need it. Good metaphor. > It was either Ben Shneiderman or Don Norman who put their finger > on it when they said that common tasks should be easy, infrequent > tasks should be possible. That's the problem with Sun's Admintool. Common tasks are easy, but even within a common task, there is usually a twist to it, or nonstandard option you need for any nontrivial task, and Admintool just breaks. What good is the use of adding a printer with Admintool if you have to hack around with System V command-line printer administration to get all the options set correctly? A much better role model is IBM's SMIT from what I've heard. > Optimizing tools for the common case is easy. Lots of people use > them a lot and provide great volumes of feedback to the designer. > Its those infrequent tasks that are difficult. In unix, > infrequently used (but essential) tools tend to have miserably > usability. Seriously, when was the last time you manually > invoked dump without having to read the man page and puzzle as to > why you put all the options together as a string, and then put > the values all together? The most glaring problem in this area > is adding a disk to a system, which has been discussed to death > in these mailing lists but little has been done to fix it. Hmm, just repartitioned my drive with a 750MB shared FFS partition between FreeBSD and Solaris and swap partitions on both drives, again shared between both OS's. Gotta document that! :-) > Installation is another infrequent task, and probably the only > in the infrequent category that is getting any attention. Yeah, sysinstall is pretty nice, but could stand to be a lot more modular. Maybe this summer I could settle down with Jordan and hack on it. If I have time... I hope.. > > 2) Should be comprehensive, everything from adding users, setting up the > > network (including Web server, NFS, etc), tape backups, printing services, > > I was just thinking about this. This is a notable omission from > the current install. If FreeBSD came with a very basic ascii to > postscript filter, we could get basic text printing for most > peaple with locally attached printers without too much fuss. Good idea! And definitely needed. Actually you need to go in the other direction too, a postscript to HP (or Epson, etc..) Ghostscript filter is needed for many home users. Even at work, I've used GS to connect to an HP Laserjet III which is my primary printer, so don't forget that not everyone has a Postscript printer. It'd be almost worth it to put GS into /usr/bin, it's not all that big. ---Jake
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