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

[Florian Diesch]

Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:

> Florian Diesch wrote:
>
>> Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> _webmin_ - it's the individual modules.  Personally (and list members
>>> should by now be getting tired of hearing me say this) I believe that GUI
>>> admin tools are _always_ the right way to do configuration, and this is
>>> pretty much anathema to many of the hardline debian geeks.  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.
>> 
>> * GUI tools usually don't have things like search, replace, undo,..
>>   which makes them hard to work with except for very simple tasks.
>> 
>> * Most of them don't support saving and restoring so it's hard to go
>>   back to or compare with your old settings
>> 
>> * Often they don't support comments which IMHO makes them close to
>>   unusable if more than one person is modifying the config or configs
>>   are worked with over a long time
>
> Yet again, these are arguments against specific implementations, not
> arguments against doing configuration with tools.  There's no excuse for a

I just don't know *any* GUI config tools that supports this things.
And that's just the basics, with text file based configs you easily
get versioning, template or rule based generation, automatic
distribution, ...


> gui tool not supporting save & restore.  Heck, if I was writing the tool,
> I'd probably embed svn.  Yes, comments are important - so when writing a
> config tool, _make_ people add comments.  If you're hand-editing, you
> certainly can't enforce that.  The search/replace/undo business is harder
> to implement, but there's no reason at all that the config tool shouldn't
> or couldn't do it.

It's the same as with CLI based syntax checkers: We have to muse
what's there, not what may be possible.




   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>
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