Why Elektra is the wrong approach (Was Re: The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management)

[nodata]

> - Session-wide software: Just so we're all on the same page, 
> "session-wide" means something that runs in a user desktop session.
> Historically, the desktop wasn't very advanced and didn't integrate well
> with the system. Back then things that really was session-wide would run
> as a system-wide daemon mostly also because it required root to enforce
> policy. Things like acpid for power management event handling, updfstab
> for removable media, ifplugd for handling network cable removable,
> networking scripts etc. comes to mind. As you can see with Fedora Core 5
> this is radically starting to change; acpid is obsoleted by
> gnome-power-manager, updfstab (and fstab-sync for that matter) is
> obsoleted by gnome-volume-manager / gnome-mount, the networking scripts
> is starting to be completely obsoleted by NetworkManager. We have more
> things on out "hit list"...
> 

I hope the hit list doesn't get much longer, you're moving all of the command-line power of Linux into guis, exactly the opposite of why pretty much everyone I work with uses it.
I'm sure it's tucked away in the gconf registry somewhere. Anyway..

I haven't been following this closely, so apologies if I overlap with
something already said.

I'd like to ask a few questions about how system-wide configuration is
being replaced by session-wide configuration. It is as if the desktop is
being assumed to have a single user. These questions come from someone
used to doing command-line configuration, not the gui stuff.

There seem to be a lot of new programs that replicate functionality that
you might expect a system-wide daemon to perform, plus perhaps a fancy
(tiny) *optional* gui to interface with the end-user.

But I don't really know how pup or NetworkManager work, which is why I'm
sending this e-mail. I'm sure other people (probably not on this list)
might have made similar assumptions.

For example, pup checks for updates, notifies the user if there are any,
then lets them choose to install them.
What if there is more than one user? Does everyone get to decide?
Why isn't some yum updater daemon downloading the updates automatically,
and pup then springing the question on the user about whether they want
to update? Is this not as good?

Networking with NetworkManager - is this per-user too? Can all users on
a system decide which networking connection they want to take
preference? Is there a scoring system to decide who wins?

Gnome power manager - why does each user get an icon in the notification
area? Can they all decide when the computer goes to sleep?

Thanks,

nd