Re: System administration with GNOME.

[Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Lauris Kaplinski wrote:
> 1. Specify universal config file syntax (xml?). It should also specify
> in-memory interface (DOM?), CORBA bindings etc.

Definitely a good idea.  This is what I believe Apple is doing with their
system.  What might be a good idea is to be able to describe a particular
OS in terms of an XML file.  For instance, you could do something like
this:

<nis>
	</etc/yp.conf>
</nis>

etc etc.  The application can load up this file and use it to configure
the system.  Installing new configurational stuff would be as easy as
adding to this file.

> separate (xml?) file - imagine what it means for people needing kickstart
> installs etc.

Ooooh, now thats my kind of thinking!  Being able to kickstart
workstations and make a gnome configuration that is exactly teh same as
something else.  If something goes wrong we could just rebuild a new one
for a customer.


> Writing (2) is probably trickiest part (sendmail!) - but if we would have
> well-designed (1), it is mostly mechanical work (read spec and write yacc)

Sendmail is standard on Unix machines.  However, you should also add
support to postfix as well.  Won't the sources to sendmail already contain
the parser?  Otherwise how does it load up it's conf file?

	sri