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

[Alex Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Martin P Holland wrote:

> >> No No No! It should diagnose the problem.
> >Er.. it does?
> No it makes an attempt, a not very good one.

Perhaps I'm a jammy get, but it's diagnosed every problem I've ever had!

> 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 ;-)

Granted, that probably happens for people. There are always going to be
some things that kppp can't diagnose as well: dial-up under linux ought to
be a bit more integrated, perhaps.

> 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.

I don't think new users want to bother with permissions, to be honest,
it's a sysadmin thing. The usual way of doing things is to create a
'modem' group, etc., and as you say, separating the dialler and configurer
would be a good idea. But there's no reason why the programs should be
'separate' in that they're disparate to the user. Kppp (AFAIK) forks at
runtime, and partially drops priviledges anyway, but you could run both
programs and have them talk using IPC rather than forking; not sure what
the benefit would be necessarily.

Cheers,

Alex.


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