Re: no external panels for gnome-control-center [was GNOME Feature Proposal: Backup]

[David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com>]

Hi,

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Sergey Udaltsov
<sergey udaltsov gmail com> wrote:
>> an fancy editor for /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf - it's a completely
>> inappropriate app because if you know what httpd is, you really don't
>> want to click GUI buttons - you want to edit the config file with
>> vi(1) or whatever your editor of choice is. Same goes for a lot of
>> other distro-specific config tools created "because we need a GUI"
>> without really thinking whether it was a good idea. </rant>
> Err... Personally I always thought that the area where IIS was way
> ahead of httpd is the GUI configuration tools nicely integrated into
> system configuration GUIs.

Didn't IIS actually add a configuration file after strong demands from
administrator? I don't know, it's not important. Now, whether a HTTP
server needs config UI or not... nothing prevents anyone from writing
an app that does that... It just won't be shown in the "System
Settings", that's all. Which I actually think makes sense. I actually
regard a stock HTTP server like Apache (or even an application server
such as e.g. Tomcat) more as an application, not an OS component. And
I think, these days, you'd maybe want to write the configuration UI
for a webserver using HTML5 and JS anyway. I don't know.

That said, it could be that some HTTP server configuration could
appear in the "Sharing" panel, see
http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointOne/Features/Sharing  - for example,
to share your public folder via HTTP and exposing a bookmark via mDNS
so it shows up in browsers on the LAN that supports this (for example,
Safari and Epiphany I think). That would be handy.

Either way, I think this is completely orthogonal to the discussion on
whether such a panel makes sense. I'm just mentioning this to explain
how GNOME should, no wait, MUST, be driven by design. Not some
misguided feature-for-feature parity thing or some PHB-directive
saying "everything needs a GUI". In there lies madness.

    David