Re: [Sheflug] https

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

>>>>> "Martin" == Martin P Holland <m.holland [at] noether.freeserve.co.uk> writes:

    Martin> On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
    >> The issue is if kppp _doesn't_ work.  There is no graceful
    >> failure mode; the automatic response seems to be "post to
    >> ShefLUG."  :-(

    Martin> Neither is there a graceful failure mode if you invoke
    Martin> pppd from the command-line.

People who do things like that generally read man pages.

    Martin> It seems you expect _more_ of kppp.

I do.  Maybe I've been reading too many Al Hudson posts.

    Martin> Maybe you expect too much from GUI apps ;-)

No.  It's not a double standard; I demand the same from text-based
apps.  I'm not pleased with the results there, either.  But GUI
advocates claim to do better.  In fact, they claim it's practically
automatic.

My claim is that the effort spent on making GUI config tools
"painless" would be better spent on improving standalone documentation
and access to documentation through the GUI.  But GUI is inherently
biased to the lowest commmon denominator.

    Martin> What kppp does is to report what was logged to
    Martin> /var/log/messages.  It's hard to see what else it could
    Martin> do.

As Al points out, there are a lot of things it could do.

    Martin> It's true though that if kppp fails for some reason then
    Martin> you are going to have to increase syslog debugging and
    Martin> grovel through /var/log/mumble just as you would if you

Why me?  Why doesn't the GUI do it?  (Or does it?  I don't use kppp,
obviously.)

And why doesn't the GUI package all that information up into a nice
mail message you can address to the help channel of your choice?
Emacs and Debian both have standard means to accomplish this (for bug
reports, anyway), although in both cases they're not very accessible
to newbies (due mostly to poor UI configuration).  Wouldn't this be a
perfect application for the GUI, since it's all already in your face?

    Martin> were using the command line but since the vast majority of
    Martin> newbies were already connected at this point, "so what"
    Martin> has to be the response. Without kppp they'd still be
    Martin> chewing their pencil and looking nervously at the ppp
    Martin> HOWTO or more likely have given up and tried beos instead.

Or maybe they were using Debian and got exactly the same result from a
non-GUI prompt and answer session.

What, then, is the benefit of GUI?

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