Re: [Sheflug] https

[Martin P Holland <nospam [at] noether.freeserve.co.uk>]

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

>    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.

Sadly decoding pppd failures is deeper magic than anything in man pppd
where there is no documentation at all about pppd failures. The stuff in the
ppp HOWTO is also pretty inadequate.

>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.

Both things are required. In practice your statement about the GUI is true but
it surely need not be. 

My experience of GUI apps for sys admin tasks is also fairly underwheling. In
fact kppp is the only GUI app I use for a sys admin task. But I don't see why
that has to be the case.

Maybe this is something to do with the way information (config files) is
organised in unix. These come from a pre-GUI tradition so perhaps it's no
surprise that the CLI seems to do better. Maybe we are pushing agaginst the
limitations of unix. I'm not truly convinced by this argument I confess ;-)
But I can imagine that config files might start to have richer content than flat
ascii, xml say. Maybe when we start to operate in new ways the good points of
the GUi will become more apparent and it won't appear just as a least common
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.

I missed that. I'll have a look.

>    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.)

Well kppp does grovel through /var/log/messages but the clues there
with default syslogging are usually minimal. And in any case with fuller
debugging it's still a highly nontrivial task.

AFAIK the failrly puny attempt that kppp makes is superior to that made by any
other app GUI or CLI so it's seems churlish to criticise them too strongly,
given a daunting task and one that nonone else can be bothered to take on.

>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?

The issue here is decoding the meaning of the detailed logs. There is currently
no automatic system in place for this, just the mumblings of gurus in the
newsgroups. Mailing hyper gibberish to people is no different from telling them
to read it in a file. 

The effort here needs to be directed to decoding the log into a fixable problem.

>    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?

I'm sure that kppp has connected successfully many more newbies than any other
method. That's the benefit. Ultimately apps like kppp will be responsible for
the fact that I will be able to buy  a new piece of hardware and I won't
have to first check that it's supported I'll _know_ that it is (just like
windows users do). 

atb

Martin

-- 
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~pm1mph



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