Re: Proposed: gnome-nettool

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Mark McLoughlin">

> 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.

The problem with this argument is that the audience specification is subtly
complicated. The *real* audience isn't the person clicky-clickying on the
GUI, it's the person on the phone asking them to do the clicky-clickying. So
describing it all in accurate network technology terms is a very positive
thing -> anyone who's had to do over-the-phone network diagnostics for the
other OS knows that the terminology breakage makes communication incredibly
hard, and the lack of a clear, one-stop-shop interface for figuring things
out is crippling.

This is not going to be a front-line, in-your-face application. It's going
to be like zenity -> something that is basically for admins, but is exposed
to users.

I'm tempted to suggest we post to gnome-deployment-list and see what the
admins there have to say, or ask for a Sun support person to chime in on it.

  :-)

- Jeff

-- 
OSCON 2004: Portland OR, USA           http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/
 
   "This is the new dividing line in public life. It is not a question of
    Left versus Right, but a struggle between insiders and outsiders." -
                                Mark Latham