Who mentioned man here? Last time i edited vsftpd.conf, the comments provided me with more-than-enough information. søn, 12.09.2004 kl. 04.05 skrev Sean Middleditch: > On Sun, 2004-09-12 at 02:44 +0100, Paul Trippett wrote: > > Dont you love it when you mention something at 1am without properly > > thinking something through :) > > > > However... > > > > > It shouldn't be required to ask questions to get a "bare bones" setup. > > > > I don't think we should rule out the large majority of people coming > > over from other OS's, these people being the "I know what I want to do > > and why I want to do it, but don't quite know how to do it". > > Realistically how often would you install a tcp service and leave it at > > that. > > Who cares what other OSes do? If your reason is "other OSes do it," > your reason, for lack of a better term, sucks. ;-) > > > > > How many times have you heard someone say "I installed Linux, now what > > do i do?" > > "Documentation." ^_^ > > > > > Some people may like being asked questions while others do not, but it > > doesn't hurt to give people the option. There must be quite a few uses > > for more generalised post install package configuration tool which isn't > > just limited to vsftpd and this thread. > > Yes, actually, it *DOES* hurt people to give them the option. You have > to ask questions about asking questions. You still end up with tons of > questions that the user has no clue about or doesn't care about and, > therefor, you get back answers that are most likely incorrect for what > the user really wants. You add a lot of complication for little gain > when other solutions exist. > > > > > > If you want a system that asks a bazillion questions on install time, > > > doesn't guarantee they'll be translated, doesn't guarantee they'll be > > > phrased intelligibly, and has tons and tons of infrastructure developed > > > and maintained instead of just good configuration tools and intelligent > > > defaults, you should install the OS produced over at > > > http://www.debian.org. > > > > Last time I used apt on debian from the command line i remember it > > saying something along the lines of "The following packages need to be > > configured before the can be used, would you like to configure them > > now", not only does it tell you they need to be configured it also gives > > you the option to help you do it, nor does it break automated installs. > > Just like everything else Debian has its place and also has a pretty > > good "bare bones" install itself. > > The debconf system has various priority levels for their questions. You > are forced to answer a "what priority of question do you want to answer" > question, and then lower-priority questions are ignored and a default > answer is used. A number of packages, however, abuse this system > heavily. The system also maps very poorly to a GUI. Packagers cannot > craft a clean, usable GUI, but instead must specify questions in a > rather abstract format so multiple frontends can handle it. They are > forced to deal with a lowest common denominator that functions pretty > poorly for every frontend. > > The priority system is also entirely broken in concept. What is > important to one use is trivial to another. Many packages which are > merely dependencies have questions which must be answered, which > especially is confusing when they are pulled in due to some completely > unrelated package. (Yes, dependency chains *will* do that, when > packagers don't break up their packages appropriately, or application > authors make it impossible to break up the packages.) > > When a novice user hits Install Everything, they get everything. Are > they really expected to be able to answer all the questions that come > up? Or do you expect the priority levels to give sensible defaults with > the user being able to change things later? If you picked the latter > (which you should've), then the question becomes, why the heck have the > infrastructure to ask questions at install time anyhow, when you > *already* have to ship a second solution and provide sensible defaults?? > > > > > I dont know why but not everyone likes trawling through man pages for > > half their waking day trying to get something to work. > > There are better forms of documentation than man pages. If you think > the only options available are "ask questions at install" and "be a UNIX > guru," you are failing to think of a ton of options in between. > > Fedora/RHEL already have some great server configuration utilities. A > new user just has to go to System Settings to find them. Tools exist > for Apache and Samba at least, and I know quite a few others exist. > More can be added. Along with good, clean, user-oriented documentation. > These solutions help both users during the initial install *and* helps > them down the road when they need to update or modify their settings. > > Honestly, it isn't that much more "work" to install a package and click > on its config utility than it is to install the package and have a half- > assed config dialog popup. And the former solution solves far more > problems in a much better fashion. > > > > > >
