[Gllug] Sluggishness and confusion

[Bruce Richardson]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 01:38:51PM +0000, Steve wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 12:45:52 +0000, Bruce Richardson
> <itsbruce at uklinux.net> wrote:
> 
> > > Examples?  I don't know of many easy-to-use, supported, actively
> > > developed, and fully integrated GUI tools on Debian.
> > 
> > The Debian project doesn't see that as their job.  
> 
> Which is no better than saying The RedHat Corp don't see it as their
> job to pay developers to work on curses-based tools.

It's not the same at all.  Both systems need the low-level stuff.
It's like saying "OK, my foundations are crap but my building is taller
than yours".  It's not just that it is not a defense, it's a silly thing
to say as a tall building on poor foundations only becomes shakier as
you build taller.


> > > I agree.  However in the real world I think Redhat achieves close to
> > > this - CLI is reliable, and easy.  GUI tools are reliable, and easy.
> > > Curses tools are reliable, easy, but no longer actively supported.
> > 
> > Why?  It is quite explicitly a bad design decision.
> 
> Its not bad design, its good use of resource.  Be serious - do we
> still provide for linuxconf in redhat? No - because it was goodish for
> its time, and is no-longer used.  Correct me if I am wrong, but how
> much active development is there for ipchains now?

That comparison is entirely bogus.  Iptables is a component that is a
fully functional replacement for ipchains that not only provides the
same functionality *but provides equivalient functionality to the old
tool*.  The GUI tool is not a replacement for the curses tool, because
the ability to administer from the command line, without X, was *key
functionality* of the curses tool.

Our fundamental disagreement here, is that I think the basic design
decision is significant and you don't.  Not much further we can go from
there, but one last thing...

> 
> I think you'll find millions of sysadmins think the quality of RHEL is
> rather good.

There are not millions of RHEL sysadmins in the whole world and who
knows whether the actual number use it because they like it or because
they have to.  I'm an RHEL syssadmin, after all (have to, some of our
IBM kit mandates it).  I'll stand up for my opinion compared to the rest
of them any day of the week and I think the quality of RHEL is rather
poor.  Inasmuch as it is actively designed to a purpose, rather than the
accretion of legacy decisions, it is intended to be easy for them to
support, rather than to be genuinely useful to me.  In that context, the
limited interfaces and flexibility make a lot of sense to them and cause
a pain in the neck for me.


-- 
Bruce

I unfortunately do not know how to turn cheese into gold.
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