[K12OSN] synaptic and K12LSTP repositories

[Les Mikesell]

On Sun, 2005-08-21 at 12:30, Petre Scheie wrote:
> Ah, yes, so it is.  I think Webmin has a BSD license.  Is there a reason 
> it's not shipped with K12LTSP or Fedora?

It could just be historical - long ago RedHat shipped something called
linuxconf which was an ambitious but slightly insane GUI management tool
that configured everything whether you liked it or not.  Then they did
all those python redhat-config-xxx tools instead that store all kinds
of gunk that really belongs in individual program config files under
/etc/sysconfig and this became the RedHat way of doing things even
after the tools were renamed system-config-xxx.  This approach makes
things easier to edit programmatically at the expense of people who
expect application config files to contain everything in one place.
Usually the RH/fedora init scripts pull values from the /etc/sysconfig
files and pass them to the applications on the command line at startup
so the programs aren't modified but they don't do quite what you
expect if you just look at the application's own config file.

Webmin takes a more distribution-agnostic approach by trying to parse
existing config files in their native form - but of course it now
has to accommodate the munged versions on RH/fedora systems too,
which tends to be a moving target as the system-config-xxx tools
are added and tweaked.  Personally, I'd rather have seen all the
effort go into making webmin better or helping people understand
the native config files instead of avoid them...

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com