Re: Ease of use and configurability
On Thu, Apr 30, 1998 at 03:13:52PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> Am I the only one who feels that, to a large extent, ease of use *is* a
> technical problem?
In the end no one can beat this ;)
> This is a somewhat major proposal and would be a big piece of architecture
> if implemented. However it's something I've been kicking around in my head
> for months and I haven't yet come up with a good counter-argument.
>
> I'll also be pretty surprised if something similar hasn't been proposed
> *somewhere* before.
>
> I note that on April 20th, the "Gnome System Control Panel Project" was
> announced (see http://www.gnome.org). I think this is our opportunity to
> work with its originator, Andy Doran, on making a consistent, easy, and
> powerful interface for configuring programs.
Branden, I don't want to put you down, and I didn't even read your proposal
carefully. Just some random thoughts about this issue:
1) There was a very long discussion on debian-admin (I can send it to you,
if you like), where all the technical issues have been discussed. It is
*very* complicated to do it right. For example, you have to make sure that
editing the configuration files manually will not break anything.
2) The KDE (and Gnome) approach of several little config programs will not work,
as every single program is to specific and has the configuration hard coded
and seperated from the underlying programs. This is a very bad thing, IMHO.
Also, the programs run only in a certain environment, for example KDE. What
happens when I want to mix KDE and Gnome tools? There is no one that
guarantees that this will work. Also they only work under X.
3) Please take a look at COAS. It seems to do what we want. It is GPL'ed,
distribution independent, and does provide a framework for multiple
extensions. We certainly should work on this (note: I did not looked at
COAS, but it seems to be the Right Thing. Some other people could tell us
about their experience with COAS?)
I hope we will have the best system in the long run. I don't feel good about
suboptimal configuration tools, they tend to create more problems then they
solve.
Thank you,
Marcus
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