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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    configuration
From:       Arjan Buursink <arjan.buursink () planet ! nl>
Date:       2002-03-09 14:13:16
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I like to have your advice on the following issue.

KDE can't do without the console utitlities available. Therefore a lot of KDE 
programs have been written to make use of an intuitive interface as a front 
end for these console utilities. Also there exist a lot of KDE programs to 
address the issue of making configuring much easier. Of course there are a 
lot of configuration files that don't have a KDE front end. Normally it will 
take a lot of time to make a front end for every config file. In practice it 
will be much easier to do the configuraion by hand instead of writing such a 
front end. Unfortunately, as a consequence, KDE will therefore not handle all 
configuration aspects of a system. 

I therefore suggest some kind of front end that needs, in common situations, 
only one line of code for every configuration aspect. For example, I want to 
configure my video card. Normally I therefore have to read some manuals and 
edit the XF86Config file. Wouldn't it be easy to be able to write code with 
contains for example the follwing lines:

setConfigFile("/etc/X11/XF86Config")
listBox("Resolution","Modes", "1280x1024", "1024x768")
listbox("Color Depth","Depth", 8, 16, 24, 32)

Processing this file wil popup a window which let you change the settings of 
the file "etc/X11/XF86Config" by showing two listboxes. The first one gives 
you the opportunity the alter the resolution and the other to alter the color 
depth. After pressing the ok button XF86Config will be changed according to 
the entered values. Of course after that X should be restarted to apply the 
changes. You should therefore, for example, add the following line to the 
code above:

ok ("Exit X Windows",exit)

Another example:

interface = listBox("Interface", "eth0", "eth1", "eth2")
address = string("Enter IP address")
exec("ifconfig", interface, address)

This code will let you setup your network card. Ideally, it should be even 
possible to make a simple cd-writer program with let's say less than 100 
lines of code of this "configuration language". 

Last example is handled by most Linux distributions. But it is important to 
have an distribution agnostic way of configuring things. Furthermore, KDE 
runs on more OS'es than Linux.

At the moment I am thinking of making a program that is able to process the 
code from the examples. Note however that I have written nothing and thus the 
code may be a to be developed scripting language or C, C++ or whatever.

I would like to have some comments on these ideas from a user perspective and 
a developer perspective. Would you think this is useful? In what language 
should the configuration code be written? Do you have other suggestions?

Best regards,

Arjan Buursink

 
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