Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 02:15:25 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: Sean Eric Fagan <sef@Kithrup.COM> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Microsoft brainrot (was: r-cmds and DNS and /etc/host.conf) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970928005949.17419A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <199709280254.TAA20632@kithrup.com>
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On Sat, 27 Sep 1997, Sean Eric Fagan wrote: > Of course, what Terry is talking about is having a common utility to do the > disk partitioning, install menus, etc., and have a "script" for each > particular need. There are numerous examples of existing utilities to do > this, in commercial OSes. > > "The experienced user will know what to do." > > Most people don't need all that information; most people just need to set up > a fairly standard configuration. That's what the "friendly" tools are for. > And the files are still editable for the people who know what they are > doing, and what they want. My view is that configuration tools (and perhaps a menu of such tools) are very useful and would make FreeBSD more readily accessible to relatively new users. The problem with configuration utilities, whether they are GUI or text-based, is that they put a barrier between the user and the system, so that one may never really know what's going on. Actually Microsoft is not the worst in this; IBM is worse. And I personally think that one reason (probably not the main one) for the failure of OS/2 is that you can use that system indefinitely without getting any idea of how it's put together, where things are, what file to look at to find out what you did to it when you clicked on some tab and chose an option. This veil of ignorance between the user/administrator and what's really going on is not good, because when the GUI tool doesn't work, you don't know where to go or what to do. Eric Pearce's _Windows NT_ in a Nutshell (O'Reilly, of course) has 90 pages on "Using the Command Line," and he says in the intro that "I am a firm believer in the command line. The promise of GUIs being easier to use always seems to break down when you start doing something really complicated." Already there are posting in questions-freebsd and on Usenet revealing that if sysinstall doesn't work to add new packages, the users have no idea what to do. So for FreeBSD, rather than Microsoft Whatever, I think the config tools should educate as well as make things easy. DNS via GUI may be a hard case--to represent the underlying structure graphically. But consider a simpler situation--adduser. One runs adduser and in its 2.2-STABLE manifestation, it offers (once only) an opportunity to select defaults. It doesn't say where these defaults are being stored, or offer the information that this file can be edited later. It doesn't explain that a valid shell has to be in /etc/shells (would you like to look at /etc/shells?), even though ksh is offered as an option, and ksh neither comes with the system nor is it installed on my computer. It doesn't ask me if I'd like an opportunity to edit the defaults in the future with adduser or whether I never want to see this stuff again. (A really new user is probably going to get something wrong the first time.) I would think that a good approach would be to create various configuration utilities that can be called up with some command that lists them all, and if called up in text mode indicates which ones can only be run only from X, and may use different interfaces. But their use should lead the user to a greater understanding of what's going on underneath....so that the utility, whether GUI or text-based, doesn't have to be perfect and cover everything.... Annelise
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