vsftpd.conf

Kyrre Ness Sjobak kyrre at solution-forge.net
Sun Sep 12 11:50:26 UTC 2004


Who mentioned man here? Last time i edited vsftpd.conf, the comments
provided me with more-than-enough information.

søn, 12.09.2004 kl. 04.05 skrev Sean Middleditch:
> On Sun, 2004-09-12 at 02:44 +0100, Paul Trippett wrote:
> > Dont you love it when you mention something at 1am without properly
> > thinking something through :)
> > 
> > However...
> > 
> > > It shouldn't be required to ask questions to get a "bare bones" setup.
> > 
> > I don't think we should rule out the large majority of people coming
> > over from other OS's, these people being the "I know what I want to do
> > and why I want to do it, but don't quite know how to do it".
> > Realistically how often would you install a tcp service and leave it at
> > that.
> 
> Who cares what other OSes do?  If your reason is "other OSes do it,"
> your reason, for lack of a better term, sucks.  ;-)
> 
> > 
> > How many times have you heard someone say "I installed Linux, now what
> > do i do?"
> 
> "Documentation."  ^_^
> 
> > 
> > Some people may like being asked questions while others do not, but it
> > doesn't hurt to give people the option. There must be quite a few uses
> > for more generalised post install package configuration tool which isn't
> > just limited to vsftpd and this thread.
> 
> Yes, actually, it *DOES* hurt people to give them the option.  You have
> to ask questions about asking questions.  You still end up with tons of
> questions that the user has no clue about or doesn't care about and,
> therefor, you get back answers that are most likely incorrect for what
> the user really wants.  You add a lot of complication for little gain
> when other solutions exist.
> 
> > 
> > > If you want a system that asks a bazillion questions on install time,
> > > doesn't guarantee they'll be translated, doesn't guarantee they'll be
> > > phrased intelligibly, and has tons and tons of infrastructure developed
> > > and maintained instead of just good configuration tools and intelligent
> > > defaults, you should install the OS produced over at
> > > http://www.debian.org.
> > 
> > Last time I used apt on debian from the command line i remember it
> > saying something along the lines of "The following packages need to be
> > configured before the can be used, would you like to configure them
> > now", not only does it tell you they need to be configured it also gives
> > you the option to help you do it, nor does it break automated installs.
> > Just like everything else Debian has its place and also has a pretty
> > good "bare bones" install itself.
> 
> The debconf system has various priority levels for their questions.  You
> are forced to answer a "what priority of question do you want to answer"
> question, and then lower-priority questions are ignored and a default
> answer is used.  A number of packages, however, abuse this system
> heavily.  The system also maps very poorly to a GUI.  Packagers cannot
> craft a clean, usable GUI, but instead must specify questions in a
> rather abstract format so multiple frontends can handle it.  They are
> forced to deal with a lowest common denominator that functions pretty
> poorly for every frontend.
> 
> The priority system is also entirely broken in concept.  What is
> important to one use is trivial to another.  Many packages which are
> merely dependencies have questions which must be answered, which
> especially is confusing when they are pulled in due to some completely
> unrelated package.  (Yes, dependency chains *will* do that, when
> packagers don't break up their packages appropriately, or application
> authors make it impossible to break up the packages.)
> 
> When a novice user hits Install Everything, they get everything.  Are
> they really expected to be able to answer all the questions that come
> up?  Or do you expect the priority levels to give sensible defaults with
> the user being able to change things later?  If you picked the latter
> (which you should've), then the question becomes, why the heck have the
> infrastructure to ask questions at install time anyhow, when you
> *already* have to ship a second solution and provide sensible defaults??
> 
> > 
> > I dont know why but not everyone likes trawling through man pages for
> > half their waking day trying to get something to work.
> 
> There are better forms of documentation than man pages.  If you think
> the only options available are "ask questions at install" and "be a UNIX
> guru," you are failing to think of a ton of options in between.
> 
> Fedora/RHEL already have some great server configuration utilities.  A
> new user just has to go to System Settings to find them.  Tools exist
> for Apache and Samba at least, and I know quite a few others exist.
> More can be added.  Along with good, clean, user-oriented documentation.
> These solutions help both users during the initial install *and* helps
> them down the road when they need to update or modify their settings.
> 
> Honestly, it isn't that much more "work" to install a package and click
> on its config utility than it is to install the package and have a half-
> assed config dialog popup.  And the former solution solves far more
> problems in a much better fashion.
> 
> > 
> > 
> 





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