<div>On 1/9/06, Paul A Houle <<a href="mailto:ph18@cornell.edu">ph18@cornell.edu</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Rahul Sundaram wrote: [snipp Perhaps things have gotten better in rawhide, but the "firewall configuration" gimmick in RHEL is a classic example of "uselessware". Pretty much every system I run needs to have a few ports punched in the firewall that aren't in the list -- the firewall configuration gimmick never remembers the ports that I've already opened, so I have to keep a list of the ports that I've opened somewhere (or maybe look at the conf file I'm not supposed to change) and enter them all in by hand. It's an example of "for the want of a nail... the kingdom was lost" that often kills GUI apps.</blockquote><div> If you are talking about system-config-securitylevel, that is just now true. </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> The basic issue is that a GUI firewall editor has to support 100% of the functionality I need or coexist with my ability to edit conf files by hand, or it's 100% useless. </blockquote><div> Useless to you. A God sent by to most who haven't read through the Iptables HOWTO. </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">A GUI app that does 90% of what I need isn't enough if there is no workaround to get the other 10%. </blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">>> >> To make GUIs work, Unix would have to give up on >> human-comprehensible configuration files. (Yes, that means XML.) > > Many of them have indeed adopted XML but this is not the one true path > by any means. > I'm not against XML, I'm just saying that XML files don't count as human-comprehensible and editable. Something that's basically a database is another option, but again, other than (arguably) relational databases, those aren't human-comprehensible and editable... You may not really be able to have it the GUI way and the "Unix way" -- that doesn't mean that everyone has to stick to the Unix way. My complaint about GUI gadgets (particularly the one in RHEL/Fedora) is that they "almost work" and never "really work" because of a mismatch between the data structures and the UI model. One way to get a correct application is to make the data structures fit the UI model. There are problems with that, but it's possible to make tools that really work that way.</blockquote><div> You seem to be very unluck with GUIs. When ever I use a system-config-* is because it does the job easier and faster than using vi. </div> </div>-- As a boy I jumped through Windows, as a man I play with Penguins.