[ale] bleeding edge (was why so difficult)

[Joe Knapka]

"Keith R. Watson" wrote:
> 
> At 12:20 PM 10/29/2000 -0500, you [Doug Bridges] wrote:
> 
> >It is not impossible to create a system where people who want to get under
> >the hood can, and those that want it to run on autopilot can.
> >

> design from it. Why can't a system have both wizards and command line? To
> answer my own question, if it was that simple everyone would be doing it,
> so maybe it's not that simple.

I believe that a big part of the difficulty is that (a) most
command-line
administration tools and system programs are not written with GUI
interaction in mind, and (b) most GUI wizard-like tools are not written
with command-line scripting in mind. That combination of facts just
makes it harder than it needs to be to support -both- paradigms
consistently and well.

Changing this state of affairs would require some major co-ordination
between system software implementors and configuration-tool writers,
at least.  The NextSTEP folks presumably had that kind of coordination
from the start, so they produced a nice system in that regard.

I think it would be interesting to produce a Linux distribution in
which all system configuration files were XML, and were administered by
a
common UI. That would be a huge-ish job, but arguably a step in the
right direction.

-- Joe

*** Joseph Knapka ***
In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks)
are to be treated as variables.
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