[indiana-discuss] Indiana Wish List

[Richard Elling]

Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
> I wrote:
>> Some do (printmgr) and some don't (services-admin). In the 20+ years
>> I've been involved with SunOS, there has never been a GUI system
>> admin interface that was comprehensive or survived.  OTOH, this 
>> ould be a red herring... I notice that when using my Mac, the GUI
>> tools are generally much better than the command line equivalents.
>> So much so, that I tend to rarely use the command line for sys
>> admin anymore.  This would be a nice place to be.
> 
> How so?  A GUI that can do things the command line can't?
> That would be terrible; how could one script the same thing
> to be done repetitively (or by cfengine or puppet or whatever)?

Don't read that into my statement.  A large segment of the Solaris market
does automate installations and sysadmin tasks.  But I don't believe that
is the segment Indiana is targeting.  Indiana seems to be targeted the
underserved personal desktop -- those who will hopefully never see Jumpstart
in their lifetime.

I've been beaten over the head by SMIT-lovers for 15 years.  Sun has never
been able to get its collective act together to solve this problem.  So
this is an opportunity.

> Aside from ease of use, the GUI shouldn't add anything, IMO;
> certainly not functionality that couldn't be scripted.

Disagree.  A GUI can show the implications of action and interdependencies
of objects.  This is almost impossible to do in CLI.  For a sysadmin,
especially a novice, this is invaluable.  Geezing a bit, in SunOS 3 we had
a really cool GUI for setting up diskless clients.  It showed how disk
space was allocated to the various clients and was very intuitive.  It went
away in SunOS 4, and, IMHO, we've never been able to get back to that
state.  Opportunity.
  -- richard