Re: SEUL: Documentation: info & postscript

[Micah Yoder <yoderm@geocities.com>]

Dave Wreski wrote:

Hi!

> 1.  It seems like we are worring about the small little details too early.
> Although things like compiling the kernel automatically are important,
> don't we need a foundation to start with, before we worry about how the
> user will see the interface?

Our "foundation" as I understand it, is Linux itself.  (Did we decide on
RedHat then???)  We already have the stable OS we need.  We just need to
make it more friendly.

> 2.  With all the talk about GUI apps, etc, has anyone thought about simply
> using a web browser?  Whats wrong with having httpd running on all boxes,
> and using this as a backend for all configuration applications?  You could
> even use it as a replacement for GNUs 'info', and possibly a replacement
> for man pages as well..

That would be fine, except possibly for computers with 8MB RAM or less. 
If we're aiming for the new off the shelf computers, I don't see a
problem with that.

Of course, you can view HTML docs without a web server.  But right, it
would be pretty simple to write CGIs for configuration stuff though. 
But what about security?  There might be some serious security holes
with CGI modifying system configuration, I don't know.

Also, we'd still need the 'info' docs in HTML for this to be useful.

> 3.  How many of us are kernel programmers?  If there aren't that many/any,
> should we be so concerned with modifing the auto-detection mechanism of
> the kernel, to probe for devices?

This should be a general Linux thing and would have no need to be SEUL
specific.  I guess we could be Linus to figure out how to get
auto-detection in...:-)

> In summary, I think we need to look at what we already have to work with,
> start simple, and strictly define our goals, before we do any actual
> development.  Have we already defined specifically our end goals?
> 
> I know this may sound like an obvious question, but I don't think so, if
> we are already talking about which GUI builder to use.  I just think which
> GUI builder to use would be easy to figure out, once we decide exactly
> what we need to build :)

I think we're already far enough along to start writing some of the
user-end config apps, and deciding on a "standard" for productivity
applications.  So we do need to find a good UI toolkit.  As far as I can
tell, *all* of them have some serious disadvantages.  This isn't good!

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Micah K. Yoder            My computer is 100% Microsoft free!
yoderm@geocities.com      Support freedom in computing:  Use Linux!
http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Shores/2359
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