This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: linuxconf (was Re: Open Relay?) From: Joe Brenner <doom@kzsu.stanford.edu> Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 10:28:39 -0700 Gregory Hosler <gregory.hosler@eno.ericsson.se> wrote: > On 12-Sep-00 Statux wrote: > > Honestly.. how many people actually use Linuxconf? :) > > I (with close to 10 years of Unix experiance, as well as 7 > Linux) recommend it to new users... which is not to say > that I use it for everything I do. You must have had much better linuxconf experiences than I have. My experience has been that I go "Hm, instead of really learning how to do this, why don't I give linuxconf a shot", then it (a) doesn't work and (b) breaks something else, so I both need to learn the "manual" approach *and* debug whatever problems it caused. My big gripe though is that it's too closed-mouth about what it's doing. It pretends to ask you before it makes modifications to something, but really it does some things silently. If there was an extremely verbose linuxconf log, at least it would serve the function of letting you know what setup files you should be looking at. (And how about automatically generated backup files and an undo feature? Or is that too radical?) (I also have a rule of thumb: when RedHat introduces some new whizzy feature and recommends it for use by newbies, you should wait a minimum of three distro point revs before you even consider touching it. Of course by then, RedHat will have yanked it and replaced it with some other alpha quality software...) === Subject: Re: linuxconf (was Re: Open Relay?) From: "Michael R. Jinks" <mjinks@uchicago.edu> Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 14:16:30 -0500 On Tue, Sep 12, 2000 at 10:28:39AM -0700, Joe Brenner wrote: > > If there was an extremely verbose linuxconf log, > at least it would serve the function of letting you know > what setup files you should be looking at. (And how about > automatically generated backup files and an undo feature? > Or is that too radical?) This would also be invaluable as a learning tool. Linuxconf has saved my neck a time or two when I couldn't get something working but it could, mostly because I would forget some detail here or there. But was I any better off after it solved that instance of that problem? Better to have it solve the problem and also tell me (or let me find out) how to do it myself next time. ===