Why Elektra is the wrong approach (Was Re: The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management)

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 14:36 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 20:19 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Well, you know after all the times Gnome people removed functionality
> > because they knew better and future would prove them right, then refused
> > to put them back in even after people did not get used to the new world
> > order ("residual" complaints as Putin says in Chechnia), your
> > declarations of undying love for not-in-gui-session-management can be a
> > tad frightening.
> 
> Replacing all the old cruft with new stuff is bound to introduce a few
> more bugs along the way. I think it's called... progress?
> 
Getting rid of old cruft is fine.  It's just that some of the changes
made in the past have broken features that are central to expectations
of how Unix systems should operate.  People are worried that these great
new changes are going to leave us with a trail of broken behavior among
the features that made us start using Linux and Unix in the first place.
Saying the new interface is more intuitive and better does not allay
these worries, rather it adds to people's fears that the developers are
not concerned about breaking the way Linux and Unix have always worked
because the developers "know better".  To make those worries go away,
the "new stuff" has to learn to do the right thing for those old ways of
doing things.

> At least I learned something today: Never ever propose anything that
> might be a bit visionary on fedora-devel-list; you will just get shot
> down by the vocal minority and you will get flamed you for the
> improvements for the silent majority you helped create.

Visionary is fine.  But as a developer of the new technology you have to
keep in mind the features of the present system that users actually like
and figure out how to keep your changes from compromising them.

From my understanding of the technologies, I don't see anything wrong
with their design.  But the implementations have been geared towards
doing things through a sparkly new graphical UI and user-managed
services with little (perceived?) work enabling the equivalent
commandline functions or how to divide permissions when the
administrator wants the resource to be managed system-wide.

In other words, great start! but you can't consider it a job well done
until you've paid the same attention to usability on the command line as
on the desktop and figured out how system-wide settings interact with
per-user.

-Toshio
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