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

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> 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?

I think distros is the more tricky of the two, because many admins will
benefit from these tools too. WinNT succeeded partly because it could be
"admined by monkeys"... so in terms of administrators a large class of
them (the ones that haven't already been consumed by Unix ;-) are going
to prefer a nice GNOME way of doing things.

WRT to distros... well this is where things get tricky. In principle I
think these tools need to be working closely with the GNOME project
because GNOME *is* the OS to most people in the world (same with
KDE...). Having these tools developed separately as add-ons to GNOME
that GNOME developers never see until RH/Mandrake release their brand
new distro is a bad situation. We can't plan our menu structures, file
manager integration, what have you well because we don't really know
what's going on here until its too late.

And of course, there are always distros like Debian and Gentoo that
don't have the resources to field their own (decent) development in this
area.... but I'd rather have a GNOME system tools solution that doesn't
get relegated to corporateless distros.

Mandrake and RedHat then are the two players that we'd need to
coordinate with. Apart from the "works on all distros" issue (which is
of course a show stopped), I actually really prefer RH's tools, but I'd
like to see them developed in cooperation with the GNOME community
rather than with black box XFree86 style development (worse than
XFree86, really). 

The choice of setup tools as one of the "distro value adds" is sort of
arbitrary, and I hope the distros would agree that they'd rather pool
work like this rather than building an arbitrary "value add" area around
it.

-Seth

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