On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 10:48:09PM +0100, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
The latest generation, redhat-config-*, were, IIRC, written over a
comparatively short period of time (ISTR they all happened within a
year!), and covered basically all of the major server functions at the
time - networking, httpd, bind, mail, ...)
These were all renamed to system-config-* in the early days of Fedora, and
in fact they're still around (if, as you note, largely actually abandoned
code).
(Historical corrections very much welcome. Also, while one lesson
from the history is that "it can be done", another is "it has been
done and it then has been abandoned" - it would be interesting to know
_why_ the tools have been abandoned. I haven't been working at Red
Hat at that time, so I don't know the reasons.)
I wasn't either and I equally don't know, but I can tell you why they
weren't useful to me at the time:
1) no handling of multiple machines (or even remote connections to a
single machine)
2) little cohesive ux design (this did get iteratively better)
3) some of them didn't work very well (*cough* samba)
4) generally, you had to commit to using them and never touching the
config files by hand
5) I was operating in an environment with Red Hat Linux, Debian,
Other-Linux-Flavor-Of-The-Day, BSDI, NetBSD, netbh Solaris, SunOS, IRIX, Tru64,
and, um, VMS. All the various single-vendor GUIs just brought more pain.
I would certainly add "no API" to the list of complaints _now_, but I'm not
ashamed to admit that that wasn't on list of sysadmin concerns a decade ago.
Some of the above might be instructional, some of it might just be stories
about the olden days. :)
--
Matthew Miller ☁☁☁ Fedora Cloud Architect ☁☁☁ <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>