Re: YaST GPL'ed

Le mercredi 24 Mars 2004 08:57, Simon Edwards a écrit :
> Well, I grabbed the source and I thought I would have a go at compiling it
> on Mandrake. Maybe I'm just a "learn the hard way" kind of guy. First
> impression "man there are a lot of packages!",

Yes but it seems to cover a lot of features... maybe that explain the number 
of packages since it is very modular.

> I had a look at the source, and yes the rumours are true, then invented
> thier own mini-language. If you feel like you have to create your own
> programming language just to create what is basically a utility program,
> you should stop and think that maybe that is (god's|universe's|life's) way
> telling you that you are doing something wrong. For the love of god, pull a
> script style language of the shelf; we have plenty of them in OSS-land, and
> use it.

Since YAST is an old project now... I'm convinced that they didn't find 
something suitable at that time. ;-)
Maybe we should take carefully a look at the exact goal of this language... 
it's strange that someone develop something like this from scratch as you 
pointed out. There's two reasons here :
1) we've missed something subtil,
2) they have done this wrong just for fun ;-)


> We real list can go up on the website, once it is organised a bit more.

Full ACK!

> > 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.
>
> I think that is probably overkill, but anyway...

I disagree completely from this point. I've looked at both tools... From the 
UI point of view I prefer yours (with a big plus since it uses kcm). But, 
from the architecture point of view I clearly prefer Henning's one (even if 
it's a little rough and slow... it can improve IMHO).

Since we are aiming at an enterprise desktop, the frontend/backend 
architecture is IMHO a must have. We should think to sysadmins that want to 
set a configuration to a test computer and then deploy it on the network. 

Through a clear backend/frontend separation it's far easier to achieve (and 
the XMLRPC-daemon illustrate well this point).

For now, I don't have a clear opinion to the path to follow (YAST or your 
tools). But, it would be a very good thing to avoid duplication of effort and 
merge your approach and Henning's one... in this case we can have the best of 
both worlds.

Regards.
-- 
Kévin 'ervin' Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net
"Ni le maître sans disciple, Ni le disciple sans maître,
Ne font reculer l'ignorance."