[OT] Debian mailinglists [was: RE: Debian or Ubuntu?]

[Mike Bird]

On Mon May 19 2008 14:45:38 Dotan Cohen wrote:
> 2008/5/19 Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca>:
> > Configuration
> > should always be possible through a question/answer system, rather than
> > hand-editing, because even the most experienced users make mistakes when
> > hand-editing, while a GUI tool should always prevent syntactic errors.
>
> I very much disagree with you on this one. Configuration should be
> unambiguous and easy to edit. What kind of GUI config would you use
> when you ssh into your server? Even on my desktop, I try to use the
> cli for configuration as much as possible. Other than kcontrol, I
> haven't used a gui configuration tool since at least Ubuntu 7.04.

I think the key is in the words "should" and "possible".

Believe it or not, some silly routers cannot be configured remotely
without a web connection.  Some kinds of problems, which can be fixed
on a Cisco via a telnet chain, require rolling an engineer to the
colo for silly routers.  Let's not make that mistake with Ubuntu.

Configs MUST always be readily understandable and modifiable by
both humans-with-texteditors and programs.  Simple text config
files and maybe XML are acceptable; Windoze registry is not.

Derek's point is that it SHOULD also be possible to edit configs
via a question/answer system with syntactic and consistency checks.

--Mike Bird