Miloslav Trmač (mitr(a)volny.cz) said:
Historical note... about 15 years ago, Red Hat has spent a lot of
development effort on writing or integrating configuration GUIs, and
they were available for a large part of the then available
functionality - even reimplemented in multiple generations (Tk based
tools, linuxconf, redhat-config-*).
Ugh, linuxconf. Don't remind me.
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, ...)
This has been done in the past, and this could be done again, if we
really tried.
(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.)
They were abandoned, more or less:
1) because the hard core admins didn't use them anyway; they would either
edit the configs by hand (old days) or just push out their configs with
puppet/chef/ansible/cfengine/salt (these days)
2) becuase the less hard core admins had enough other issues that this wasn't
going to win them over
3) because we were unable to create a larger upstream community that allowed
us to drive development forward
4) because chasing all the options that could be configured for something
like this is actually somewhat significant work
5) because there wasn't any encapsulation for common automation - it was
just separate 'click here; do this' sort of tools
Bill