hdparm.conf

[Jason Voegele]

Hi Arjan,

On Tue, July 26, 2005 10:53 am, Arjan Geven said:
> On 7/26/05, Jason Voegele <jason at jvoegele.com> wrote:
>
>> But by no means should hdparm be providing its own GUI wizard.  Indeed,
>> hdparm is also used in a server environment where a graphical
>> environment
>> might not even be installed.
>
> Eh?  I agree with you that it's good to separate concerns, and that
> calling programmers lazy is really not fair, but here, I disagree. A
> GUI wizard is perhaps not needed in server environments, but that
> doesn't mean that it shouldn't be provided at all. There are also many
> users who DO have a graphical environment, and a GUI just allows for
> much faster and easier changing your configuration without the
> necessity to read the man pages, the web documentation and mailing
> lists. A good program is intuitive, and does not require its users to
> climb a learning cliff. Which is something a lot of people in the
> Linux world still have to learn I guess.

I'm not saying that a GUI wizard shouldn't be available, only that it
should be provided by a distribution or desktop environment.  I don't
think it makes sense for each and every application out there to reinvent
the wheel and create its own configuration GUI.  A configuration editor
should be a generic component, such as Webmin for example.

Now in order to have a truly generic configuration editor, more
applications would have to agree on a consistent config file format, but I
think that is far more preferable than each application writing its own
configuration GUI.  What GUI toolkit should it use?  Do you need to
provide a different GUI wizard for each toolkit out there?  Should it
integrate with debconf?  I don't think these are questions that can be
answered at the individual application level, but rather are questions
that can be answered by Ubuntu, or Gnome, or KDE, or Webmin, etc.

-- 
Jason Voegele
"There is an essential core at the center of each man and woman that
remains unaltered no matter how life's externals may be transformed
or recombined. But it's smaller than we think."
    -- Gene Wolfe, The Book of the Long Sun