After reading an enormous number of "TradeMarked Name --redhat-config-" I hope this mail will lead to a bit more constructive messages. I would appreciate somebody of Red Hat to gives RedHat's opinion.
Mike Harris already gave his own personal opinion.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2003-October/msg00830.html
He's unfortunately sceptical, but hopefully I can still convince him :-)
For people who don't know (I already posted something about this about a month ago, but I didn't get too many reactions) there exists another project who tries to make config tools: Gnome System Tools: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gst/index.html
They basically have the same goal as we do: Making easy to use config tools. A nice thing they furthermore did is split the front-end (the GUI) and the backend (writing the appropriate files on disk). For the GUI they use GTK and as programming language C and Python are accepted.
The backend is currently written in perl. Due to this split it is possible to have a common frontend for all linux distributions because the backend arranges all the distribution specific things.
Most of the people hacking on it are people from Ximian, but RedHat is following the development (I saw some posts of Havoc Pennington on the list). The GNOME system tools guys are going to propose their tools for GNOME 2.6
So my proposal would be to bundle our forces with Gnome System Tools. I have the following arguments. They could benefit from their tools and we from theirs. Fedora.us and Redhat also merged for having similar goals
* It will make the people happy who are afraid that their work will only be used by Fedora and Red Hat users.
* It's possible that the config tools will become a de-facto standard, when Red Hat and Novell (Ximian, Suse) back this. Being an open de-facto standard motivates people to contribute. For that reason people are happy to contribute to tools gcc and apache etc.
I my self do research in a large consumer electronics company and there standards are really important. Things become a succes due to standards and in the end the standards are better for all companies. Look for example what happened to CD (a standard, a success) and Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) and minidisc (both failures, because they were not backed by all electronics companies)
Also in software you can see that de-facto standards are really succesful: TCP/IP, the linux kernel, all the GNU tools, Apache etc. etc.
* Having standard GUI tools with flexible backends will maybe in the end lead to a standard for all configuration files. If the linux distro providers can agree on a standard for configuration files someday (hopefully sometime soon). They just can do this from one release to another and an average desktop user won't even notice this.
* Advantage for Red Hat is that they can share development costs with more people. Also standard tools will be good for redhat because it will be good for linux in general.
* Mike's reply to my included following statement: [quote] And "same tool works the same on all distros" is a nice thought, but that's not the *highest* priority. What is more important than our tool being the same one SuSE and/or Mandrake, etc. uses, is that our tool actually works for our distribution without a lot of hacking, or developmental latency. Our tools are developed on _our_ distribution release cycle. An upstream tool is developed on volunteer time, and different components of such a suite would more likely than not have different release cycles. [/quote]
I understand this is an issue, but for all the other packages (hundreds of them) included in Red Hat you have exactly the same issue. Linus for example does not release kernels at exactly the right moment for RedHat releases. And some of these programs are way more complicated then config tools.
* In the end config tools are not really important for the average desktop user. Once the desktop user gets everything working the way he wants, he just will use programs like Mozilla, Evolution, OpenOffice, Gaim to have fun and get his work done. It's only a major pain when he decides to go to another distro (for example because he was not happy with the service the distributor offered him) to get everything working again.
I hope this convinces you redhat guys ;-)
Jaap