[Setup-tool-hackers] RE: 2.4: System Tools - Please try them

[Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net>]

On Mon, 2003-06-02 at 20:57, Seth Nickell wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-06-02 at 04:01, Mark Finlay wrote:
> > > "Boot" - maybe useful, but probably not something you'd have as a
> > > seperate dialogue in a perfect world.
> > 
> > Well in a perfect world no-one would be dual booting, but the fact is
> > that pretty much everyone who installs linux nowadays is familiar with
> > the idea of a boot manager. That makes this a really useful tool IMHO.
> 
> I still contend that the number of people who actually want to tweak
> this setting around (as opposed to it just working, which it does when
> you install new kernels and stuff) is relatively small. Like I said, not
> a feature I'd cut, but probably one that'd I'd bury. Menu items are very
> much at a premium.

Yeah, now that I think about it I'm limiting myself by not thinking
outside of the traditional constraints of linux. Boot managers should
really be self configuring and it should be a fringe case when we want
to fiddle with it. There is no reason why it shouldn't "just work".
A gui to configure it in those cases is useful, but need not be
prominent.

> In situ settings are in general preferred to centralized wherever they
> can be found. We have a clock, lets let people set it rather than
> pushing the abstraction of their being a "system clock" that the panel
> applet is merely a display of, etc etc. There are both conceptual and
> practical (menu items are at a premium) reasons to not put it in the
> desktop prefs.

Agreed...
 
> > IMHO this stuff is not on gnome-system-tools plate. Once we've fixed the
> > gnome menus the gnome-system-tools can fit in very easily. So the
> > questions is really "Can we commit to fixing Desktop Preferences by
> > 2.4?", if not then we may have trouble fitting the gst in.
> 
> Not necessarily on gst's plate, no, though as the primary "GNOME module"
> that would be affected by it, I would guess they'd participate in
> looking for a solution.

Definately, GST should be an integral part of out menu stucture
planning...

> In the end my primary worry is that these are a minorly useful set of
> system tools relative to the possible ones, and I suspect they were
> implemented because they are relatively uniform across distributions. If
> you had to pick 6 systems tools to have implemented, I suspect that only
> networking would be in this list. Will the gst stuff be able to handle
> the more important (but probably harder) system settings? Will it?

Agreed again. You've convinced me. We need to think in terms of what we
need, not what we have or what is easy to implement.

Of the top of my head my list of tool that i actually would use as a
user are:
- Time tool
- Network tool / internet connection wizard
- Printer tool
- Software managment tool
- Password changing tool

And as an adminstrator:
- User tool
- Samba tool
- NFS tool
- Authentication tool
- Apache tool

But then we have to ask ourselves, how much to we want to do and how
much do we want to leave to the distros/admins? Where do we want to draw
the line?

-- 
Mark Finlay <sisob@eircom.net>

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