Re: [Sheflug] https

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

OK, Al, you're on.

Show me a 3D, color-coded graph, along with a set of relevant buttons,
that helps a user whose kppp refuses to connect to his ISP get it
right.  It must be necessary to use all three dimensions, and the
color coding, of course; if it can be done in text it doesn't count.

>>>>> "Al" == Alex Hudson <eah106 [at] york.ac.uk> writes:

    Al> On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

    >> What they are _not_ is educational.  Most GUIs are very
    >> incomplete, and excessive GUI use is highly correlated with
    >> inability to deal with a crisis.

    Al> I don't agree with that for a second ;) GUIs are able to show

Well, then give us some examples of complete, educational GUIs for
computer system administration.  The tool for Samba is pretty good,
I'll grant that one.  fetchmailconf is another.  But just trolling the
Sheflug archives will give me examples of a dozen bad ones, I'll bet.
That's not a good ratio....

    Al> fundamental n-dimensional relationships between data /
    Al> functions much better than the command line ever will.

Which has squat to do with the problem of administering a computer
system.  And the command line is a straw man.

    Al> To be able to see dynamic results to a configuration change
    Al> requires the use of a GUI.

Say what?

Sure, you can see whether the button is up or down.  But it's rare you
make that kind of change from the command line; it's normally done in
a config file.  I can see the difference between YES and NO pretty
easily, can't you?  ON and OFF is a little harder, I'll admit.

The results that are really interesting (eg, if you screw up the
config for relaying in your MTA) you don't see until well after you do
`kill -HUP'.

    Al> To be able to group configuration options logically requires
    Al> more than a command line.

Yeah; that's why environment variables, config files, and text editors
were invented.  Funny thing about config files, they usually contain
comments (eg, the one in my smailconfig that says "host name checking
off for RFC 1123 compliance and because [address deleted] consistently
forgets its own name").  Haven't seen a GUI yet that allows, let alone
encourages, keeping that kind of notes.  (Technically, I guess web-
browser-based ones do, using the generic facility some browsers
provide for taking notes on URLs, but I don't know anybody who takes
notes with their web browser.  And AFAIK those notes require that you
use the same browser to access them later.  "Encourage"?  Not!)

Most GUIs simply provide the same interface as a well-organized config
file, except that in the GUI you click on a tab and in the config file
you use string search, and in the GUI you click on buttons while in
the editor you do a word delete and type "YES".  Big deal.

Except that the GUI rarely gives you access to the comments already in
the files.

    Al> GUIs are so useful for so many other reasons it's untrue.

Once again (4th time), I have never denied they are useful---to the
well-educated, as well as to the lazy.  My issues are with education,
reliability, and troubleshooting.  I think they are inherently lacking
on all three counts, and I've yet to see any argument from you that
they are useful for those purposes.

    Al> Viewing trees.  Viewing graphs. 3D graphics. I think
    Al> you've obviously been tainted by the (vast) number of crappy
    Al> interfaces out there... ;))

I certainly agree with you that the vast majority of GUI interfaces
for computer system administration are crappy.

True, trees are useful for managing file hierarchies and sometimes
option hierarchies.  These are not usually large enough in typical
sysadmin problems to matter, and when they are it's quite common for
the poor user to discover that the hierarchy he had in mind is quite
different from the hierarchy the GUI designer had in mind, and that
basically to find what he needs involves searching a huge unordered
list---except it's in two dimensions and you need a panner to see
what's going on on a display with 100x150 character resolution.

Graphs, let alone 3D graphics, have nothing to do with the kinds of
problems we're talking about; none of the newbies on this list are
generating gigabyte scale logfiles that require modern data-mining
techniques to interpret, fer heaven's sake.

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