Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 15:23:25 +0100 (BST) From: Paul Richards <p.richards@elsevier.co.uk> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, nawaz921@cs.uidaho.edu, chuckr@glue.umd.edu, freebsd-chat@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: editors Message-ID: <199605231423.PAA04334@cadair.elsevier.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <199605231357.XAA08987@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at May 23, 96 11:27:38 pm
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In reply to Michael Smith who said > > I'm suggesting that you had not significant interaction with users learning > Unix sufficiently recently to remember anything much about it. Well, that's certainly true, I don't let anyone through an interview unless they wrote their cv using nroff and ex so the people I work with are pretty unix aware :-) > Ok, let's split /etc/sysconfig up again into a dozen configuration files. > Let's remove all the comments, and use a different syntax for all of them. > Hell, let's stop using raw text; I'm sure vi can handle editing binaries, > so let's just put everything in a big patch area in 'init'. The way to make sysconfig more accessible is to write a configuration tool that doesn't even require an editor. The general feeling is that this is a good thing as long as the information is held in a plain text file so "experts" can get in there with an editor if they want to. I'm all in favour of making things easier, hell, I started us off down the sysinstall route in the first place and I didn't make any noise about ee going into the installation procedure because I agree that vi would be a bit of a problem to someone trying to install FreeBSD with no unix knowledge. > > I've asked this already, what editor does Linux provide by default. People > > move from Windows to Linux in droves so if anyone is getting this newbie > > stuff right it's the Linux crowd. > > pico. Interesting, and BSDI have done the same thing. If pico is bmaked then maybe we should move it into the base system and provide it as an option since it may be becoming fairly standard. We installed it on Cardiff University's mainframe OSF box as an "easy" alternative to vi and the Windows folks seemed to be happier with it. Providing new tools to make life easier doesn't bother me. Redefining what the normal unix environment is does bother me. -- Paul Richards. Originative Solutions Ltd. (Netcraft Ltd. contractor) Elsevier Science TIS online journal project. Email: p.richards@elsevier.co.uk Phone: 0370 462071 (Mobile), +44 (0)1865 843155
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