possible yast porting? was: slashdot on fedora-marketing-list

[Sam Folk-Williams]

On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 17:25 -0400, Steve Barnhart wrote:
> On 8/30/06, Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > Ya I really am saddened that no other distros have taken advantage of
> > > > YaST being open source. Everyone keeps wasting resources and
> > > > rebuilding when YaST is a good alternative and includes an ncurses gui
> > > > too. I really like YaST and is probably the reason I keep having a
> > > > hard time deciding between Fedora and openSUSE and keeping both of
> > > > them on my HD. Porting YaST should be way simpler for Fedora as it is
> > > > already RPM based. So many modules are there that rebuilding something
> > > > else just seems like a waste of time.
> >
> > Please god no...  YAST is one of the worst systems out there.  linuxconf is
> > pretty close too.
> 
> Umm actually Novell seems to be doing pretty good including it in
> their server options and I would like your reasoning for demeaning it
> in such a way. Not that I do not realize it has problems of its own, I
> think too many people simply critisize it because well, it makes
> things easier. Personally I can personally compare it to the control
> panel and atleast with something like that I could do stuff much
> easier/quicker that way and if I was trying to help someone else
> (especially newer people to Linux) it would be easier to walk them
> through that/document stuff then have them cut/paste into config files
> and the like which is in different places usually for distributions
> anyway.Ubuntu seems to be building one and reinventing the wheel as
> usual, but I would like to see Fedora getting in with a control panel
> also and YaST seems like a prime candidate.
> 
Steve,

Here's my two cents. A lot of administrators I know hate /all/ control
panels. Most of these control panels are web-based. Like, webmin, Plesk,
cpanel, etc. The general rule of thumb with control panels is that they
always have a strong possibility of hosing your configuration files (and
in some cases your whole system), they often severely limit the number
of options you have for any given service, and they often don't do
things in the "right way" (i.e. the way the admin in question would have
done them).

YaST is the only one I know of that is an integral part of the distro,
rather than an add-on product, but it's essentially the same thing. I
would suspect that newer users to Linux (especially those coming from
Windows) would be attracted to YaST initially. The more experience one
gains, though, the more one realizes the tool's limitations and
drawbacks. I thought YaST (and webmin) were a god-send when I first
started using Linux. But now I wouldn't even think about touching them. 

I suspect most developers and seasoned admins would agree, but a lot of
users would rather have the GUI tool even with its drawbacks... I would
just say, be careful and don't depend on it too much.

Having said all that... Fedora includes all kinds of GUI tools (both
graphical and ncurseS) that perform these kind of routine system
administration tasks... system-config-*

Sam
> Steve
> 
-- 
Sam Folk-Williams, RHCE         Red Hat Global Support Services 
Phone: 919/754-4558             GPG ID: 1B0D46BA 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20060830/c3dcad24/attachment-0002.bin