Discussion of Fedora Server use-cases

[Bill Nottingham]

Miloslav Trmač (mitr at 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