removing the junk.

[Bruce Cran]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 09:11:06 -0700
Devin Teske <dteske at vicor.com> wrote:

> ... but what about the people that don't know how to use said services
> whom are trying out FreeBSD for the first time?

There is a place for configuration UIs. Just a couple of days ago I
needed to share a directory with my Windows 7 laptop. I found that KDE
has very complete support for samba (and NFS) which turned a half-hour
of reading about obscure Windows protocols into a few minutes of
clicking on the right settings. It'll horrify traditionalists, but I
was very grateful to have that available.

> I can conceptualize some of my friends whom may know Linux, or even
> other BSDs, but are not familiar with the way that FreeBSD works --
> speaking specifically to the localization of settings and toggle-bits
> in /etc/rc.conf (and *.local -- and now in /etc/conf.d too).

The traditional Unix people will say "they should learn" and that we
don't want to encourage the sort of people to FreeBSD who won't.
However, I think having a UI for some stuff is nice, though we need to
be careful that it doesn't turn into a full sysadmin tool, since then
people will start hating how it doesn't edit rc.conf (it only appends),
and it'll be something like YaST that hides the real functionality and
just annoys people with its limitations. We should make sure that we
highlight the rc.conf manual pages etc. It's easy to forget that new
users may not realise there's this whole load of system configuration
documentation already installed on their machine.

> It is occasionally rather nice to be able to -- when showing a
> competent engineer around FreeBSD -- fire up sysinstall and point out
> all the things that FreeBSD knows how to do (by way of all the things
> you can set up).

The TCP extensions are a good example of that - I didn't realise they
existed until I saw the options in sysinstall.

-- 
Bruce