On Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 03:15:56PM +0100, Andrew Savory wrote:
(resent due to problems with the list....)
bleah... rewriting this because of problems with the list. Hopefully should be fixed now and the digest will be much improved soon (although daily).
Why? I personally think if we can't have a single configuration point that is GUI-based, we are doomed (from the point of view of getting less able users to shift to nux).
So overlay it, don't make the GUI the single point. That is a wrong step. You can edit the text files when nearly everything else is in tatters. I doubt you can do that as well with a GUI.
Okay, at this point it would be useful to define the user. I'm thinking of the clueless newbie who quite frankly won't want to do more complicated tasks, and certainly won't want to type obscure commands into an even more obscure command line interface.
You don't expect them to want all their hardware to work "just so"?
Of course not. What I'd like to see is a common format for all config files, and then a set of configuration tools to sit on top of that -
Why should something like fetchmail, with its plain english config, be forced into a standard format? I think that would be rather difficult to define.
Sounds like WebMin to me (http://www.webmin.com/webmin/).
Now let's have a generic adaptive plugin and a user-land config tool too.