Re: YaST GPL'ed

Hi!
 
> I've been working on some admin tools and will take a good look at YAST when 
> it is made available. (I need to see if my efforts were just made 
> obsolete. :-] )
Yast was always available in source. But the code is not very useful. It
uses its own interpreted C++/C-like language, it is very SuSE specific and it
would take a lot of time and hard work to port everything to Debian. 
I once tried to port the RedHat configuration tools to Debian. This would be
a lot easier but does not make any real sense either.


> As far as admin tools and Debian are concerned, I think we need to catalogue 
> what tools, config stuff, and utils we want/need, plus what we have 
> available; identify where the holes are.
Using several existing tools has a few disadvantages. In my opinion every
tool should have the same look and behave the same. Code should be shared too.
Here is my list of tools, which are essential:
 * network (ethernet, dsl, isdn, modem)
 * users
 * date/time
 * language/keyboard
 * system services
 * cron-jobs
 * package management
Later on tools for server apps should be added (Samba, Apache, Squid, Exim,
DHCP, NIS, LDAP).


> There is also a good chance that YAST will become the de facto standard set of 
> config tools for KDE based distributions, or that config-developers might 
> unite behind YAST and work together on it instead of on other fragmented 
> efforts. I guess we have to wait and see a bit.
Hmm, I don't hope^H^H^H^H think so that Yast will become any accepted standard.
RedHat's and Mandrake's tools are GPL for a long time now and nearly nobody
from the free software community tried to adapt them.


You might want to look at some current screenshots of my system tools:

      http://home.cco-ev.de/~henning/gallery/

I have a strict frontend-backend architecture. The backend can run as a
XMLRPC-daemon so that remote control and different frontends (even in other
languages and toolkits) are possible. 
It was started as a part for a customized distribution of my local Linux
user group to create a free Xandros-like system. 
When it evolves it might be of interest for other users I guess ;)


Greets
Henning