[apparmor] [yast-devel] apparmor: Texteditor

[Ladislav Slezak]

Dne 3.4.2017 v 16:25 Josef Reidinger napsal(a):
> On Mon, 3 Apr 2017 09:13:27 -0500 Goldwyn Rodrigues <rgoldwyn at suse.de> wrote:
[...]
>> While hacking on yast-apparmor to remove perl library dependency, we discussed 
>> on apparmor mailing list that we cannot have all possible options and the 
>> information in yast to facilitate modification of configuration files. So, a 
>> dumb text editor would be the best option to configuration. After the user 
>> modifies the file, it would checked by apparmor_parser for validity.
>> 
>> However, I could not find any options in Yast which would provide a text editor 
>> or I din't look in the right places.

There is no full text editor in YaST. But as a workaround you could use the
MultiLineEdit widget [1]. It's a simple text field but allows editing multi line
text. In GUI you can use at least the basic shortcuts like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.
Another advantage is that is works also in the text mode and does not need any
external tools.

In the past we used this trick in the bootloader module, you could display the
proposed configuration and manually edit it. Then it was read and parsed back. This
way you could set the options which were otherwise not available in the UI.

However I'd avoid this approach, see below.

[...]
> In general I think yast goal is to allows non-expert to do common configuration, 
> so support options that majority of users find useful. Of course, it is not easy 
> to judge what is still common and what is expert only, but we should keep common 
> sense. For example enabling debugging is probably not something common user need, 
> another example is OWLSM enablement can be there with proper info that it can 
> break setup.

I fully agree with that. The goal should not be covering 100% of the
available options and configuration possibilities in YaST.

That leads to overly complex UI which is hard to use by non-experts.
On the other hand experts would probably use a terminal and their favorite editor
avoiding YaST completely.

Focus on the common cases, make them easy and understandable. For complex or unusual
cases point users to the documentation and manual tools.

The only important thing for YaST is to keep the manual changes, or at least warn
users when they will be overwritten if keeping them would be too complex or impossible.

HTH

  Ladislav


[1] https://doc.opensuse.org/projects/YaST/SLES11/tdg/MultiLineEdit.html

-- 
Ladislav Slezák
YaST Developer

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