[Setup-tool-hackers] Ximian Setup Tools & KDE

[Chema Celorio <chema ximian com>]

Hello,

My name is Chema Celorio and I am the project manager for the 
Ximian Setup Tools. As it has been discussed in dot.kde.org
(http://dot.kde.org/989997858/) you might want to take a look
at our project. The backends are a set of perl scripts that
speaks XML to the front end. They know nothing about the user
interface which is invoking them. All the do is spit XML to
stdout or take XML from stdin. We have two basic operations on the
backends the --get and the --set operation.

For example, running the network backend on my laptop i get :

[root@sarados chema]# /usr/share/ximian-setup-tools/scripts/network-conf --get
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO-8859-1' standalone='yes'?>
<!DOCTYPE network []>

<network>

  <!-- Configuration starts here -->

  <hostname>sarados</hostname>
  <hostmatch>1</hostmatch>
  <workgroup>MYGROUP</workgroup>
  <description>Samba Server</description>
  <smbuse>0</smbuse>
  <smbinstalled>1</smbinstalled>
  <dialinstalled>1</dialinstalled>

  <nameserver>192.168.0.1</nameserver>

  <searchdomain>homelan.org</searchdomain>

  <order>hosts</order>
  <order>bind</order>

  <statichost>
    <ip>127.0.0.1</ip>
    <alias>sarados</alias>
    <alias>localhost</alias>
    <alias>localhost.localdomain</alias>
  </statichost>
  <statichost>
    <ip>192.168.0.1</ip>
    <alias>suzzy</alias>
  </statichost>
  <statichost>
    <ip>192.168.100.111</ip>
    <alias>foo</alias>
  </statichost>
.....more hosts 

  <interface>
    <bootproto>dhcp</bootproto>
    <name>WaveLAN wireless LAN</name>
    <auto>0</auto>
    <enabled>1</enabled>
    <dev>wvlan0</dev>
    <user>0</user>
    <file>wvlan0</file>
  </interface>

  <interface>
    <netmask>255.255.255.0</netmask>
    <bootproto>none</bootproto>
    <name>Ethernet LAN card</name>
    <auto>0</auto>
    <broadcast>192.168.0.255</broadcast>
    <enabled>0</enabled>
    <network>192.168.0.0</network>
    <dev>eth0</dev>
    <user>0</user>
    <address>192.168.0.11</address>
    <file>eth0</file>
  </interface>
.... more interfaces
  <dialing>
    <stupid>0</stupid>
    <password>qqq</password>
    <login>joe</login>
    <phone>3232323</phone>
    <type>dialer</type>
    <name>ppp0</name>
  </dialing>

  <!-- End of configuration -->

</network>
========================================

I could then modify this XML and pipe it back to set the
configuration with :

[root@sarados chema]# /usr/share/ximian-setup-tools/scripts/network-conf --set < config.xml

So as you can see, the backend is just a perl program.
We are in fact abstracting the underlying system with the
XML, the front end has no clue what distribution or UNIX
system it is operating on. The backends could also be
used with a command line utility for example.

The current set of tools include :
time-admin
shares-admin
disks-admin
network-admin
users-admin
boot-admin
memory-admin (swap memory)
internetsharing-admin (embrionic)
print-admin (embrionic)

We are starting soon with the :
Xconfigurator-admin and a 
font-admin tool

It is late over here, i need to get some sleep but i wanted to 
drop a note saying that we would like to share the backends
between projects. We have been working on the tools for some time
now so you will not have to start from scratch. There is no
need to duplicate this functionality between GNOME and KDE. 

We can talk more about the technical issues. Feel free to ask
any questions about XST. You can get the latest tarball from :

ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/setuptools/ 

The latest announcement can be found here :
http://www.ximian.com/newsitems/xst_04.php3

We will release 0.5.0 next week, we added support for Debian
woody, SUSE 7.0, Mandrake 7.1 and RedHat 7.1. (among other
improvements and bugfixes)

regards,
Chema
chema@ximian.com

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