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List:       kde-debian
Subject:    Re: YaST GPL'ed
From:       Kévin_'ervin'_Ottens <ervin () ipsquad ! net>
Date:       2004-03-26 9:07:57
Message-ID: 200403261007.57607.ervin () ipsquad ! net
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Le jeudi 25 Mars 2004 22:02, Simon Edwards a écrit :
> Yes, but we are talking about Yast *2*. =)

Who said they redeveloped everything from scratch? ;-)
We should yield to the fact that we'll never know the reason that pushed them 
to have this language developed in Yast*.

> If the language was based on something that wasn't so common as C, then
> maybe I might suspect that they had a really different (and good) solution
> to their problems.

I definitely need a little time to dig into this...

> Another FYI, look inside the code of the Debian menu system. You know, the
> meta-menus system that takes little menu files, chews on them and spits out
> menus for KDE, Gnome, fvwm etc. Guess what. Instead of just using a script
> language and saying to everyone else "Hey, if you want extend this to
> support your XYZ desktop, crack the source open and subclass Foobar",
> people like to make up their own mini-language. Why?! So people won't get
> offended with their choice of language?

That's an explaination... Another would be to not have to depend on something 
else... And the last can be because they think it's fun to develop 
mini-language as an intellectual challenge...

> I'm not convinced that it is so important. At least for a version 1.0 it is
> better to keep things simple and concentrate on making a good set of tools
> that work on one machine first. Choose your tools wel and use good software
> engineering and then extending it for remote/RPC stuff later shouldn't be
> such a big deal.

Maybe I've not been clear on this one... sorry...
IMHO the important thing is the backend/frontend separation. If you have this 
the RPC (or what else...) is not a big deal. But if we don't push this 
separation from the beginning it will be harder to separate them later.

I didn't mean to have the RPC availability from the beginning... just the 
backend separation...

> Now, what would you want to do remotely?
>
> * Users and Groups? nope, => you would set up LDAP and kerberos instead.

Don't you need to setup the box uses LDAP and kerberos?

> * Network settings? nope, => DHCP, and if DHCP won't handle it then you
> probably can't do it remotely anyway.

True. =)

> * Backups? nope, => network file server.
>
> * Date and time? nope, NTP.

Same question as LDAP and kerberos...

> Remember, Webmin is already here and working, and it platform agnostic.

Right... But I'm not very familiar with webmin. Is it easy to deploy settings 
on a set of computers? Does it will act smoothly with the admin tools you've 
written?

> I'm not saying the you wouldn't want to do stuff remotely, just that it
> would be a good idea to write down some "use cases" of the idea.

Full ACK! Maybe we should find a wiki page somewhere and write down use cases 
we judge important.

> It should become clearer once we write down what tools we want and what we
> already have.

Just to insist on use cases, it will be far easier to determine what tools we 
need when those use cases will be available...

> For some good news. I've been playing with the redhat tools and have had
> some success with getting them to work on Mandrake. There seems to be a
> fair bit of overlap functionality-wise with stuff already in kcontrol.
> Stuff like keyboard, date and time etc. It looks like I can plunder a fair
> amount of backend code and such.

Great! That could be less backend to write for us!

> I'm also kind of wondering how important 
> being able to tweak your hardware settings are these days; I'm running
> Mandrake 10 here and I don't remember seeing much about hardware during
> installation. It Just Worked.

Nice! ;-)
On the Debian front we're not here for now... when I installed sid recently I 
needed to tweak for hardware support.

Regards.
-- 
Kévin 'ervin' Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net
"Ni le maître sans disciple, Ni le disciple sans maître,
Ne font reculer l'ignorance."
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