Discussion of Fedora Server use-cases

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 3:26 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"
<johannbg at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/28/2013 02:18 PM, Simo Sorce wrote:
>>
>> Sorry I am not sure what you mean here.
>> If you mean the Server image will never have a graphical UI I don't
>> think we are all on the same boat.
>
> For the first we dont have any graphical tools to manage our application
> stack secondly we should not be delivering products that allow for larger
> attack surface on servers then need be.
>
>
>> Not that I want to install such UI by default, but not all people are
>> comfortable managing headless servers, so the option almost certainly
>> needs to be there.
>
> Name the desktop applications that exist to manage various server
> applications?

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-*).

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.)
    Mirek