From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu May 8 15:38:26 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id PAA24061 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 8 May 1997 15:38:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from news.IAEhv.nl (root@news.IAEhv.nl [194.151.64.4]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id PAA24053 for ; Thu, 8 May 1997 15:38:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: from LOCAL (uucp@localhost) by news.IAEhv.nl (8.6.13/1.63) with IAEhv.nl; pid 19886 on Thu, 8 May 1997 22:37:50 GMT; id WAA19886 efrom: peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl; eto: UNKNOWN Received: (from peter@localhost) by grendel.IAEhv.nl (8.8.5/8.8.5) id XAA00517; Thu, 8 May 1997 23:50:57 +0200 (CEST) Message-ID: <19970508235056.11030@hw.nl> Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 23:50:56 +0200 From: Peter Korsten To: Adrian Chadd Cc: Ruslan Shevchenko , Jason Thorpe , Darren Reed , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Antispam sendmail.cf modifications.. References: <336DE9F8.1527@cki.ipri.kiev.ua> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.67e In-Reply-To: ; from Adrian Chadd on Wed, May 07, 1997 at 08:07:59AM +0800 Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Adrian Chadd shared with us: > > > > Dunno...I'm skeptical of GUIs for system configuration. Just seems > > > that there's no way they could ever be flexible enough to handle everyting. > > Thay must be extensability. > > > > In principle, GUI tools is not such bad, it can be usefull. > > GUI tools are good for most things, except for very low-level stuff or > doing evil tweaky things to configurations. :) > > However, I like GUIs because it makes the *end user* feel more comfortable > configuring something. Sysadmins and clued people of a similar nature are > the edit-config-file-type, however I thought FreeBSD was also aimed at the > average joe running Windows :) My HFL 0.02: What makes GUI's nice is that they provide information in a consistent way. They divide the information in logical chunks and you don't need to know the format of each (text) config file. (For instance, I don't know the format of /etc/inetd.conf; I'm more of a programmer than a sysadmin.) I've been hanging around Irix (eek, System V) and NT lately and I must say that I'm charmed by the easiness that you can accomplish certain tasks with. For instance, NT has a service manager with which you can start/stop/pause services on all machines that you have access to, with a simple click of the mouse. The downside is, that when something _does_ go wrong, you're completely lost in the woods. My NT server will not close a thread concerning windows when you shut down and I really don't know why or how to fix it. The problem with Unix systems and GUI's, is that it's configuration is textually oriented. You have plenty of opportunity to put in special configurations, exceptions, etcetera in such a file. It's very hard to build a GUI that supports all of that. Perhaps the solution would be to accomodate the config files to the GUI (like Windows with it's registry with an extendible key/value pairs structure) instead of the other way around. But that implies rewriting most of your operating system, so I don't think that is an option. - Peter