Re: Proposed: gnome-network

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hey,

On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 06:49, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> gnome-network
> -------------
> 
> Lots of cool stuff in here, but is it ready to go? Perhaps Desktop Sharing,
> Remote Desktop Client and Network Information will be, though some UI Review
> action would certainly help them out. The Personal Web Server and Remote
> Shell Client might need further discussion as to what we want to get out of
> them. I think this is totally hot stuff, all in all, but some parts might
> need a bit more time before hitting the Desktop release. Any portability
> concerns?
> 
> Interesting dependencies: cherokee, libvncserver and libzvt (which is only
> used by gnome-ppp, which is not built by default, and there's a continuing
> discussion as to whether this functionality belongs here or in g-s-t).


	Okay, so my take on this:

gnome-remote-desktop
--------------------

	A fairly nice looking frontend for clients for various protocols - VNC,
RDP, XDCMP and ICA/Citrix.

	I like the idea but there are some problems:

  + The actual clients themselves aren't very gnome-ish. For example if
    you were using VNC, it would launch one of the many incarnations of 
    vncviewer ... all of which have a terrible UI.

  + The user is exposed to a lot of very confusing concepts, not least 
    of which is the protocols themselves. I don't think we can say that
    many user's will know the difference between "VNC", "RDP", "XDMCP"
    and "ICA" and choose between them.

  + The interface is very different from any other GNOME interface and
    doesn't really seem to follow the HIG at all.

  + The code doesn't lend itself to easy improvement. What's especially
    worrying is that the entire interface is constructed manually in
    a single monolithic function rather using glade. Given that the
    UI needs so much work, it would have been much more promising if
    it used glade.


gnome-desktop-sharing
---------------------

	A VNC server which doesn't require you to start up another X display
like other VNC servers so someone can remotely connect to your session.
System administrators, in particular, are crying out for this
functionality.

	My main worries about adding this to 2.6 are:

  + The libvncserver dependancy. libvncserver has some real problems
    around its build system etc., but the main worry is that its not
    seeing enough active development that would give you hope that it
    will improve much.

  + You need to start the server from the command line manually.


	There are other problems, but I'll be releasing a new implementation of
this feature soon (hopefully) that addresses a lot of the problems.
gnome-desktop-sharing is a good start, though.


gnome-netinfo
-------------

	A frontend for various command line utilities like ifconfig, ping,
finger, traceroute etc.

  + This really strikes me as a bit of a "geek tool" rather than 
    something that belongs in the desktop release. Its a pretty
    nice interface to these tools, but its not really any more
    intuitive that using the command line versions. Only someone
    with a pretty good knowledge of how networks work wouldn't
    be scared off by this.

  + Portability concerns: because most of this uses the output from
    command line tools, there'll probably be a lot of work getting
    it to work on other platforms. Even on linux you have the worry
    that the format of the command line tool output possibly changing.

	
gnome-remote-shell
------------------

	A sweet frontend for ssh-ing or telnet-ing to a remote host. Reminds me
of "putty" on Windows.

  + Again, I'm a little worried that this is another "geek tool", but
    I suppose if we include a terminal then there isn't much reason
    not to include this.

    Silly thought: could this feature not belong in the terminal ?

  + It seems strange to me that the dialog doesn't go away when you
    connect ...

  + I would have thought this belongs under the system tools menu as
    "Remote Terminal".

gnome-pws
---------

	I can't really add anymore to Rodrigo's own comment about this.



	In summary: with some more work each of these could be very useful
utilities, but I don't think the module as a whole should be included in
the desktop release ... at least not for 2.6. 

	I feel like each one of them is targeting different types of users and
are only grouped together because they have something to do with
networking. What I'd love to see is some sort of bigger picture view of
what this module is about - are they "geek toys" or are they widely
useful tools to bring more of the benefits of networking to a large
proportion of our users?

Cheers,
Mark.