[system-tools] CVS Branched

[Carlos Garnacho <carlosg gnome org>]

Hi all,

Fixing bugs is fun, but even more is coding new features, and even more
when one runs out of bugs to fix for 1.0

So I've just branched the CVS for developing on new features/tools for
1.2 (the branch name is development-for-1-2) and here are some thoughts
about the features that I'd like to work on:

General changes
===============
we clearly need a friendlier way of handling passwords for not having to
type it every time we run a tool, there are several options:

- Using gnome-keyring: a password can be stored only for the current
session, so we could use this feature for asking password only if it
wasn't already stored in the session for this user
- Using an "unlock" button a-la MacOS: it could allow to preview data as
a normal user, but unblock the GUI if you're wishing to make changes. It
makes the password dialog less intrusive, but has some issues (i.e.:
some config files are not readable by normal users, so the GUI would
show up empty)
- A mixture of these both

Users tool
==========
It's quite nice as it is, but it could be even nicer if we would make
more friendly the groups stuff. My idea was to put an <allows_to> tag to
the groups so we could make people think "ok, I need this user to access
cdrom and modem" instead "ok, I need to add this user to cdrom,dip and
dialout"

Another random idea provided was to allow the backends to modify LDAP as
well as local passwd/shadow/group files, all this handled as transparent
as possible

Time tool
=========
Right now it configures NTP servers, it could be also nice to configure
NTP clients with the same config, so we can have our local computer and
our whole network in time :)

Services tool
=============
it could be nice adding support for parsing inetd conf, those are
services that start/stop on boot time, so the concept is the same

Network tool
============
This one is worth of many changes:

- We need to ease the access to the profiles, right now the file in
which the profiles are stored is only accessible by root, which is
secure, but at least we need a way of letting users know which profiles
exist without being root, this has obvious advantages
- instead of letting the tool configure eth0,1,2... interfaces, even
when they doesn't exist, provide already a fixed list of existing
interfaces, which can be already configured or not, it would require a
XML change, but would bring lots of advantages and portability fixes
- Make the tool more location/profile oriented
- adding PPPoE support would be really nice, but I don't even know
anyone that has this kind of connection, so I need external help for
supporting this

Disks tool
==========
Carlos García Campos is already working on this, it's a tool for
accessing disks, formatting, etc, it's quite alpha, but it's progressing
nicely

Shares tool
===========
AFAIK There's no integrated and friendly tool in the GNOME world for
sharing files through SMB/NFS, and a tool like this fits perfectly in
the GST concept. It could be integrated with nautilus for just right
clicking and sharing :)

So it's all I've thought, any opinion/help/code/whatever will be very
welcome

	any opinion? :)