Date: Mon, 2 Mar 1998 03:15:53 -0800 (PST) From: Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> To: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com> Cc: Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no>, khansen@njcc.com, "Ron G. Minnich" <rminnich@Sarnoff.COM>, hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: A web-based FreeBSD configuration tool. Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980302025147.22222A-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> In-Reply-To: <199803020910.BAA09297@rah.star-gate.com>
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On Mon, 2 Mar 1998, Amancio Hasty wrote: > > I'd suspect the keyboard/montitor-less configuration is much more > > important in the set of people that contribute to FreeBSD than in the > > average case. The question is if we want to lock out the people that > > _do_ contribute code. > > > Eivind. > > For a user friendly configuration tools we can forget about experts. > Besides most of them are fully capable of deploying their own configuration > tools. Well, at least I was able to for one of my contracts 8) I disagree. We can produce "easy configuration" tools as much as we want, but we will have to re-do them every time, some change is done (in distributed version, or locally by an "expert" sysadmin), if those tools won't be extensible and suitable for complex tasks. Red Hat with its tcl-based configuration is just below the acceptable level (it has more or less configurable scripts and horribly inflexible interface, no networked reconfiguration in synchronized manner, no reasonable way to add new features, no general transactions mechanism, etc), and I think that we should do something above it if we don't want to be studied in schools as the point where unix/unixlike development degraded into the same amateur level, some other kinds of programmers are known for. Sun won't do it for us (NIS+ is the best it was capable of, even though it's the opposite approach), neither will others (nothing worth mentioning here, not even SGI except as an example of poor security design). > We should start targetting newbies -- got a complaint from my ISP > that he was starting to see people moving away from NT and asked > about ease of FreeBSD . For evaluation purposes he has installed > linux and FreeBSD. If the system is designed well, its default configuration can be very newbie-friendly, however others will be able to reconfigure and/or extend it. Limiting it to newbie level won't give us much. > BTW: Now that the Java front is picking steam perhaps someone can > start thinking about using Java for system or user configuration stuff. As long as it's limited to user-interface client. I see no excuse for making a system that can't configure its own startup scripts without java, or for branching of FreeBSD distribution into "newbie" and "expert" ones, based on this (yes, I'm the same Alex Belits, who was exaplining/defending here Linux's reasons for multiple distributions -- but they don't apply well in this case). > The latest version of the jdk can be run without X . With all GUI? What low-level interface will it use? -- Alex To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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