[Off Topic] Re: Linux security

[Derek Broughton]

Alan McKinnon wrote:

> On Monday 01 May 2006 14:30, Michael Richter wrote:
>>
>> There's too many
>> calls for "open a CLI and type the following Mystic
>> Incantations<tm>" when problems are reported.
> 
> I often wonder where this meme about the cli comes from. What inherent
> factor in the command line suddenly turns it into a beast from hell?
> It's just a way to give the computer an instruction. "Click Start,
> click Programs, click Internet Explorer" translates exactly to "type
> firefox &". Click this checkbox, select that item translates exactly
> to "--<optionname>=<option value>"

I've had this argument here before.  I don't generally use CLIs - I love
GUIs (aptitude is an exception).  I do, however, know how to use most of
the CLIs on my system, and will _always_ preferentially give advice _here_
on how to use the CLI.  That's because newsgroups/mail lists are a textual
medium, and it's much more confusing, imo, to tell someone how to do
something in a GUI without graphics, than it is to tell them how to do it
with a CLI.

The problem isn't the CLI, it's the Mystic Incantations.  It's just plain
bad support when people tell you what command line to use but not what it's
doing (example - which I've seen - 'type: "sudo rm -rf /"').

Another issue is that, very often, the GUI is using a CLI under the covers -
as with a recent complaint about k3b on the kubuntu list.  In that case, it
turned out the problem was _not_ k3b, because the poster got the same
results using growisofs.  So when somebody tells you they have a problem
with k3b or synaptic, it's perfectly reasonable to ask them to try their
CLI backends).
-- 
derek