Re: Proposed: gnome-nettool

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hi Rodrigo,

On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 23:54, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 17:17 -0400, Seth Nickell wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 18:57 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
>  
> > > gnome-nettool is a user-oriented app, nothing to do with sysadmin'ing
> > 
> > What users are you thinking of for this ?!?
> > 
> corporate/university/school/public administration users that need to
> diagnose the network without an admin at hand.

	I think this is a case of designing an app and putting a use case on it
after the fact.

	The app was clearly designed as a UI wrapper around a number of command
line tools. There's nothing wrong with that per-se, because such a tool
is useful to some people - but its a tool for geeks who understand the
command line tools.

	An app that was designed for the specific task you mention - "diagnose
network problems" would be very different:

  + Instead of a menu entry with the name "Network Tools" it would have 
    "Diagnose Network Problems".

  + Instead of tabs for "devices", "ping", "netstat", "traceroute", 
    "port scan", "lookup", "finger" and "whois" (how many of your target
     users understand those terms? do you need finger to diagnose 
     network problems?) it might have a list of common network problems 
     you may be trying to diagnose. Clicking on "cannot access email" 
     might ping your mail server, then try a traceroute if that fails or
     a portscan if it succeeds ...

	I'm not going to try and say I know exactly what this tool *should* be
like or that it would be easy to write. But it shouldn't be a wrapper
around command line tools steeped in very, very technical jargon which
would be meaningless to your target audience.

	(It makes me feel bad to have to bash an app that clearly isn't
useless, that is well written and a lot of love has gone into. But it
either really is a tool just for geeks or a badly designed tool for this
use case.)

Cheers,
Mark.