Re: [Sheflug] GUI vs CLI and config file formats

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

On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Alex Hudson wrote:

>> >Right; what I meant was that kppp should automagically set the
>> >debugging higher, and help to produce a bug report.
>> 
>> No No No! It should diagnose the problem.
>
>Er.. it does?

No it makes an attempt, a not very good one. Based on the info
logged to /var/log/messages with a standard syslog setup it is usually not
possible to make an informed decision. My argument is that kppp should be doing
more than it does. But as I said I can hardly criticise them when nobody else
makes any attempt at all.

>> >I don't mean to single out kppp for criticism, really.  The point is
>> >that if they are best of breed, and yet "fairly puny", and noone else
>> >can be bothered to try that hard, that doesn't say a lot for the rest
>> >of the industry.  That's the problem.
>
>I don't think anyone who's used kppp really calls it 'puny'. It's far
>better than any other ppp config tool, bar none IMO ;)

I "really" use it, every day. I also maintain
http://www.kppp-archive.freeserve.co.uk so you can deduce that I think kppp
is a decent program. I wouldn't bother otherwise.

But I call its diagnostic output puny because it is. In 9/10 cases the info
it supplies for a failed connection is not sufficient to make any kind of a
decision. It's "Just guessing" and "Sorry can't help you there" messages
are sadly accurate ;-)

kppp as a whole is a decent program. I would argue with a couple of design
decisions though. For example, in retrospect I think that they should have
separated the dialler and the configurer into two components. I perfectly
understand why they didn't but I think they were just wrong about that. There
is no reason for the dialler to be suid root. Because the two are integrated it
"needs" to be to write the secrets file. This leads directly to RH's odd
decision to make kppp a consolehelper app; which has given rise to many baffled
postings in newsgroups. Also having two components would be educative for the
people using the program; it might help to make some sense of permissions which
will be a new concept to newbies.

atb

Martin

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



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