Re: [sabayon] Starting to map out a roadmap for sabayon.

[Scott Balneaves <sbalneav legalaid mb ca>]

On Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 10:15:27AM -0800, Job Cacka wrote:

> Scott,
>     I like the suggestions you have made. Am I correct in assuming that the
> changes that have made Sabayon function correctly have not been backported
> to older versions of gnome?

I have jaunty backports in my ppa on launchpad.  I have it on my "todo" list to
produce a hardy backport, but I haven't got around to it.

> This is the typical case with FOSS.

Well, I'd say it's the case for the software industry in general.  In the FOSS
world you CAN sometimes get backports, if developer time exists.  Commercial
software tends, on the whole, to drive you into an upgrade cycle MUCH more
emphatically. (Now that windows 7's released, bets on how fast vista gets
EOL'd?)

>     Docbook is great. Often it is beneficial to have plain text
> documentation as well. Especially, when you are in the heat of the battle.

That's the beauty of docbook.  Once you have the docs in that format, producing
pdf, html, txt, etc. all becomes very easy.  Certainly, it would be more than
possible to put text versions of the docs in $DISTRODOCPLACE/sabayon.  As well,
nice manpages for sabayon(1) and sabayon-apply(1) would help too.

>     Logging ought to be as unix/linux like as possible. If my distro uses
> /var/log that is where I want to see verbose logs kept when I am
> troubleshooting. This is a reason I gave up on Sabayon in my Ubuntu+LTSP
> install. It was impossible for me to troubleshoot in the time frame I had
> for development.

Well, I suspect that:

1) sabayon (the editor) should log to /var/log, as it's an administration tool.
   I agree that dumping textfiles in root's $HOME is a little sucktastic.
2) sabayon-apply should continue to log to stderr, so that it can get it's
   logging done in the standard place for user logging
   ($HOME/.xsession-errors).  However, it should be a lot LESS verbose than it
   is, IMHO.  I've always liked the unix "no news is good news" philosophy, and
   nothing at all, or at most a 1 line "sabayon-apply successfully applied
   $FOO profile" would be the easiest to debug, from a support standpoint.

>     Whenever you deal with ownership issues I think that modules for the
> primary authentication scheme should be used. Case in point, we use an
> OpenLDAP implementation. One of the most frustrating things in the
> Linux/Unix realm is every service seems to authenticate/establish ownership
> in a different way. My Samba server wants to use smbpasswd, Dovecot on my
> internal mail server has a special method for changing authentication, and
> the one method that works the best is Linux' own PAM. Probably, because it
> was broken at one point and much time has been spent to "fix" it. My users
> do not want to "remember" forty-eleven passwords and I do not want to manage
> that many accounts. Whenever possible do not reinvent the wheel. But then
> you know this.

Since sabayon doesn't need to interact with authentication in any other way
than doing the necessary "gksu" to become root when running the editor, I think
we should be fine.

Thanks for the comments, Job.

-- 
Scott L. Balneaves | The closest you will ever come in this life to an
Systems Department | orderly universe is a good library.
Legal Aid Manitoba |     -- Ashleigh Brilliant