Desktop issues discussion proposal

[Havoc Pennington]

On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 00:47, Matt Hansen wrote:
> 
> Are you talking generically with that last sentence or is this in the
> works? i.e. http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/config-tools/ states a
> number of tools "that would be useful but do not exist yet". For example
> it lists:
> "Firewall - configuration tool for IP Tables (something more finegrained
> than redhat-config-securitylevel)"
> What's the status on this tool and other tools listed there? One tool
> that isn't listed that would be useful is a Mail server tool - could
> take some of the complexity out of setting up Sendmail/Postfix (esp.
> Sendmail). I suppose it's lack of RH developer interest/time?

I've been arguing that for the desktop end user, we need to eliminate
the need to use any tool that ends up modifying files in /etc.

There's also a pretty strong argument that our primary target admin is
going to be managing multiple systems and using kickstart, scripts, thin
client, RHN, or other architectures to avoid configuring them
one-by-one.

Basically manually configuring one system at a time kind of sucks, and
SMBs and home users only do it because it's too much work to set up a
nice architecture to avoid it. Configuring systems one at a time this
way means you have to back up the full OS image of each system, systems
get out of sync, etc.

So the question becomes what is the target audience of a GUI that only
modifies a single system's config files in /etc. A possible answer is
that you use this GUI to configure the template system or image subtree
that gets replicated to multiple other systems.

Another question is whether effort should be focused on architecture for
configuring multiple systems at once and avoiding per-system state.

An ideal is that your machine crashes, you get a new one, you assign a
profile/template/whatever to the machine, and you're immediately back up
and running with no reconfig or data loss.

To answer your question, I think we are still spending a fair bit of
time on the config tools though.

Havoc