At 11:00 am -0500 22/11/01, baltimoremd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Thu, 22 Nov 2001, william ross wrote: > you can't have ahelpful gui and complete freedom of action, and unless you're on rails, you're bound to run into the edge of the gui at exactly the wrong moment.But, you should be able to have a helpful GUI that doesn't paint you into a corner.
as a developer of systems vaguely like that, i certainly agree with the design goal, but it's impossible to make an administrative toolkit without _any_ assumptions about the tasks or decisions or outcomes that the user will want access to. generally one identifies core tasks common to all users - create new site, add user to site, etc - then gradually elaborates with more and more functions and/or options until the law of diminishing returns makes you say 'if they know about that then they know about ssh. i'm off to mend the mailing list interface'.
i do agree that the assumption in this particular case seems unnecessary, but without looking at the code i wouldn't like to say it was silly.
> put webmin on it, close port 81 and live happily in vi ever after.better subscribe to bugtraq, though...What an alternative...I'm hoping someone, or a group of someones gets disgusted enough with the present alternatives to develop another one...
webmin is actually pretty good, and easy to get to grips with. i've never used it on a raq, so it may be that there there are issues, but for people whose primary purpose is hosting i think it's a better, more streamlined toolset than is provided by the cobalt gui.
I'd certainly consider laying out cash to have more realistic options.
i suspect that what's required here is a standard approach to tools, rather than a monolithic 'gui'. my ideal would be that each of the main functional systems offered a more or less abstract and standard interface, defined in something like xml-rpc, so that web or other interfaces can be dropped in front of them like window managers.
there would have to be a shared authentication system and something clever to keep track of dependencies, at the very least, but i would be much more interested in seeing a new extensible framework for tools than just another pseudo-gui.
but i'm getting a horrible feeling that i may be describing dot net. anyone? will