Users - design proposal

[Hans Petter Jansson <hpj helixcode com>]

Here's what came out of our discussion concerning the Users tool.

Users
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To the OC guys' knowledge, local users don't conflict with NIS users. You're
committed to either one or the other. Also, if you're going to have thousands
of users, you manage them using NIS. Conversely, if you have few users,
chances are it's a local setup.

Therefore I propose a clean distinction between NIS users (with a large-scale
interface) and local users (with a small-scale interface). These interfaces
will exist side by side in the same tool, the Users tool we have now. NIS
users will just be another tab.

We spoke briefly about the NIS interface details as well, and concluded that
it'd have a group hierarchy on the left, and a list of users for the chosen
group on the right. Users should also be searchable. I think it's vital that
we get some sort of chfn information into the system, and that goes for local
users too, although it's not that urgent. Batch processing would also be
nice, but I suggest we hold that off for a while, until the rest works.

With this approach, we save a lot of work, which would otherwise have gone
into a) making another tool or b) trying to cover local and NIS users in a
single interface. And it'll behave in a logical and practical mannger
(referring to my own logic and sense of practicality here).

To avoid NIS configuration confusing users, the tab should only show up in
advanced mode.

Comments?

--
Hans Petter