Re: System administration with GNOME.

[mats loman home se]

On 26 Mar 2000, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> 
> > Do we really need to start from scratch here? How about improving one
> > of the existing projects like linuxconf?
> 
> LinuxConf has a number of problems:
> 
> 	1. The GUI sucks.  And the more I look at a Mac, the more I
>            realize, that a generic super-cross-platform toolkit is
>            wrong for doing highly-polished, highly-nice,
>            highly-intuitive user interfaces are.

The gui could be better, agreed!

> 
> 	2. LinuxConf source code is not nice.
> 
I have not looked.

> 	3. LinuxConf source code is C.  We want scripts.
Well depends on the what module to configure..

[snipp]


There are one big disadvantage with the proposed solution is that it will
be hard to mantain, this might be the way for "old" things that should be
configured. But if we in addition to supporting the old configuration
files develop a general configuration handling library that could be used
for newer software, the mantainance for the new software will be much
easier.

The library shall contain C API that is very easy to use.
We should provie command line tools that can read the configuration format
for use in scripts. Example:

for device in `config_get_list local:network_devices`
do
  IP_ADRESS = `config_get_value local:network_devices:$device:ip_address`
  ifconfig $device $IP_ADRESS up
done

The syntax above is "invented" in the moment of writing to show the basic
idea. Please dont mix above with a binary registery as in windows. It
could be separate ascii files......

The configuration could be separated into several parts:

1. The actual configuration values stored in a file. ( the XML file )
2. Application specific configuration class description file ( XML - DTD
   for examlpe ).
3. The GUI description file. ( XML file connecting configuration elements
   to GUI components ).

XML may or may not be used. There are boot advantages and disadvantate
with XML. One big disadvantage in point 2 is that DTD cannot specify
allowed ranges for a value  for an example..

//Mats Loman