Re: To the Debian Project, IMHO
Well... my personal oppinion surely agrees with Havoc's, and I'm just addind my
$2c...
I sure don't want to see ONLY X-friendly configuration programs, specially because
after you get some insight on the matters this proves to be a slow, sometimes
unreliable and, sometimes, even impossible way to configure what you want (just
remember the problem with Win95's hardware configuration... if your hardware is
misconfigured and you can't run the GUI, then you can't hace access to the tools that
let you correct the mistake - so you're stuck!)...
On the other hand, the GUI-versions of those tools are of great value to the user
that has little time to read the whole documentation about some feature (say, SAMBA)
and want to do his learning 'as time allows it', going from a basic setup to an
advanced and optimized one setp over step, in a reliable way... For this purpose, you
can have either a well-commented configuration file (and, in the case of SAMBA, I've
never seen one that's 100% complete - RedHat's one is good, Debian's one is better,
but each one has it own tweaks, and I may want to try a mix of both) OR a
well-documented GUI-tool, like gtksamba, which organizes the parameters in groups and
calls the man file for each parameter when asked... This is a great way to do your
learning and to walk over the gap that separates the regular user from the power
user... This was the road I have chosen years ago in respect to Windows (using the
excellent documentation that the Norton Utilities used to provide for its tools), and
that's the road I've chosen to learn more about Linux.
In the perfect world, the GUI tools and the console tools will both be available, and
completely independent - i.e., you can choose to install and/or uninstall each of
them whenever you want to w/out messing with the other.
...just my $2c...
Guilherme Zahn
(still a 'pseudo' power-user)
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