Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 20:16:41 -0400 From: "Joel N. Weber II" <devnull@gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu Cc: molter@logic.it, adrian@obiwan.psinet.net.au, vas@vas.tomsk.su, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: To UNIX or not to UNIX ;-). Was: PPP problems. Message-ID: <199706160016.UAA15226@ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu> In-Reply-To: <199706152321.TAA14966@ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu> (message from Joel Ray Holveck on Sun, 15 Jun 1997 19:21:13 -0400)
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Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 19:21:13 -0400
From: Joel Ray Holveck <joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu>
Reply-to: joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu
Yes, but I can't say that we (the Unix community) haven't been guilty
of the same behaviour. For example:
* According to the RFC, rlogin should send a terminal type from the
'Assigned Numbers' list. Unix rlogin, however, invariably sends
$TERM, whatever it may be. Other OS's simply have to cope.
Has joelh heard of a `defacto standard'?
I've never used rlogin on any machine which is not some sort of Unixoid.
All the Windows machines and Macs I've used only support telnet.
Unix rlogin, however, invariably sends $TERM, since it's likely to
be right when it gets to the other end anyway.
* All SMTP, NNTP, etc, etc servers must recognize a newline as a line
terminator, despite the fact that the proper line terminator is a
CRLF.
Was the RFC written before the implementations? (I don't know the
answer here, but I'd like to know it.)
Netscape, for example, tends to introduce new featrues which break
existing programs like Lynx. This is a bit different than some
random committee chaning the standard while they write the spec.
The GNU project is currently working on a UI layer, known as Teak. I
haven't seen it in action, and it hasn't yet hit release point, but it
may be a good thing to add to future FreeBSD releases. Check it out
at http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/software/teak/teak.html FMI.
I was under the impression all teak really is is a clone of the Mac
finder. Not a completely user interface.
Something that sucks about X is that there are too many user interface
toolkits. teak is built on Guile and Tk. I'm willing to convert
E-scape to something other than Athena a few years from now
if there's a consensus within the GNU project about what it is
we want to use. (I may well rewrite parts of the user interface
in Guile and use Tk; I don't know yet.)
** System configuration
I'm sorry, guys, but this *must* be done well. How difficult would it
be to write an X interface to get the /etc files handled right? Or
maybe systems to take a new user by the hand and set up some of the
systems (like ppp) from scratch? I can see using Guile (an extension
Lisp) or a similar language to make a basic framework and library,
which then can take care of configuration for other subsystems as they
are added. For instance, the ppp package could add its little bit of
configuration code to a standard directory, which the configuration
tool could then take in and have seamless integration into the rest of
the configuration. I'm really thinking of something closer to the
Microsoft configuration wizards than Smit here; we need to be very
sure not to scare off the user with lots of technical things.
You're welcome to have that goal, but my expirience is that, at least
with the ISPs I've dealt with, it takes a bit of effort to get the chat
script to work right. I guess if teh user logs in once manually and
the OS learns from that, you might have a usable setup. I know that
what I did could never be done by JRL in two hours. (And I only have
about a five line chat script.)
- Netscape Navigator (which we can replace with GNU E-scape when it
is finished; hurry up nemo!): There we handle WWW, email, and news.
Although it's not technically very good handling of the second two, it
is easier to configure and use out of the box than, say, xmh.
E-scape isn't going to handle mail or news anytime soon, at least not
if I'm the only one hacking it.
- Some basic word processor. I'm not talking about Emacs here, since
JRL balks at the idea of not having different fonts and sizes
(although that is in the works for Emacs). Does anybody know of a
WYSIWYG (or even -ish) TeX editor or something of the sort?
There's a program called Lyx that I've heard of, but it requires that
you use its special template instead of Plain Tex or LaTeX, and it
looks like it is even less stable than [insert name of favorite
proprietary word processor that crashes a lot].
- A fax program.
An overrated feature of my machine that I happily ignore.
All of these should be documented somewhere.
Didn't you say something against the usefulness of documentation?
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