Re: gnome system tools

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Some thoughts:

 - agree with another poster that we should be looking at these as 
   a home (or corporate laptop) desktop end user. Sysadmin tools should 
   be different (and quite possibly part of a multi-machine management 
   framework).

 - I wonder if we should be bundling the g-s-t discussion as a whole; 
   the thread here already seems to be wanting to take some of the 
   tools but not others. Is that an option or do they come as one 
   framework/package?

 - agree having tools like this would be nice

 - if you look at Red Hat Linux 9 or Fedora Core test, you can see the 
   UI consequence of having Preferences and also System Settings, 
   sometimes with similarly-titled subitems.
   Do we want to go here? Or do we want to do something more clever?

 - one thing that can be more clever is to avoid the tool entirely. 
   e.g. Windows XP often doesn't make you configure a network at 
   all, it basically just dhcp's any network card you plug in
   and also monitors the link status and dhcps if you plug in 
   a cable. So for a laptop for example, there's not much 
   configuration to be done.

 - should part of the "backend" of certain tools be the hardware 
   abstraction layer? A tool like redhat-config-sound is potentially 
   a trivial HAL wrapper for example. Or HAL could expose list of 
   network cards and notify on link status changes.

Havoc