Re: System administration with GNOME.

[Paul Cooper <pgc maths warwick ac uk>]

Miguel,

I'm interested in (minor) hacking and (major) documentation of this,
please let me know what happens - I think a mailing list is a good idea.
Are we talking about sdmin of a single box or of a whole room/site/world
of computers? In the room/site/world senario I've heard that pikt
(http://pikt.uchicago.edu/pikt/) is a nice system - unfortunately we use
gp which isn't.

Paul

On Sun, Mar 26, 2000 at 09:32:22AM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
> 
> Hello guys,
> 
>    One subject we have avoided during a long time in GNOME was the one
> of writing system administration tools.  As time passes, it becomes
> more obvious that we must address this to offer users a complete
> desktop solution.
> 
>    We need to define a central place where configuration tools for the
> system could be launched and write the tools.
> 
>    I am inclined to think that we can do all these tools using
> Python/GNOME or Perl/GNOME for most of these tasks.  So we need to get
> volunteers to work on the various things.
> 
>    A few things:
> 
>       1. Ideally we want to split the core of the work from the User
>          Interface, for exaple in Perl we would have a routine that
>          does all the work:
> 
> 	      sub set_date {
> 		  my ($date) = @_;
> 
> 		  ...
>               };
> 
> 	      lots_of_gui_stuff ();
> 	      set_date ($result_from_gui);
> 
>           So that eventually we could wrap "set_date" as a CORBA
>           service (using Owen's nice ORBit-Perl stuff)
> 
>        2. I used to fear that tools that would work on BSD would not
>           work properly on Linux or in some brand of Linux.
> 
> 	  I think we just need to keep a file around, say in
> 	  $sysconfig/properties that would contain any unique
> 	  properties of a system.
> 
> 	  For example:
> 		mail_mailer=/usr/sbin/sendmail
> 		mail_locking=dot-locking
> 
> 	  And so on.  The basic idea being that we do not even have to
> 	  worry too much about this issue.  When the problem arises,
> 	  we add the new key, and we add the new code to handle it.
> 
> 	  No over-designing of things here, or we will never get it done.
> 
> 	3. Non GNOME front-ends are not a priority for now, but are
>            still possible (specially if we do the function split I
>            suggested above).
> 
> 	   For doing that, using Perl for example, we could have:
> 
> 		useradmin_core.pl
> 		useradmin_gnome.pl
> 		useradmin_web.pl
> 
> 	   And both the GNOME and the Web main programs would invoke
> 	   the "core" routines in useradmin_core.pl
> 
>         4. I can set up a mailing list to discuss this if there is
>            enough interest.
> 
>     So who wants to help? ;-)
> 
> Cheers,
> Miguel.
> 
> 
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