Re: [tlug] Dont understand???? help please

[Shimpei Yamashita <shimpei@example.com>]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 10:14:00PM +0900,
BOTi wrote:

> Shimpei Yamashita wrote:
> 
> > If I have to choose between having to use a crap tool twice a year,
> > and having to dig around man pages and HOWTOs for a couple of hours
> > trying to remember obscure config options twice a year, I'll take the
> > crap tool, live with the crappiness and save myself four hours.  If
> > it's happening every few days, though, I'll learn the magic words
> > instead and try to optimize my work flow.  It's all about saving time
> > and effort.
> 
> Probably it didn't happen to you, but once I fired up linuxconf to get an
> administrative task done and "save time and effort". Well, linuxconf got the job
> done, but it resisted in making several additional changes. For example changing
> permissions here and there, breaking my internet connection, etc. Took me much
> longer to fix up the crap that linuxconf made than it would have taken if i just
> did that administrative task from the command line.
> I never started linuxconf again...

Well, note that I never said *I* actually use one.:-) And your
experience with linuxconf is about the same as mine, although I
stopped trying to get it to work for me several years ago, after I
learned enough Linux to do most of linuxconf's tasks manually.  I do
really think they have their place--provided they work, which I
assumed they had to, considering how long they've been at it.  Maybe I
assumed too much.

I admit that I actually do use printtool, since it actually works well
enough to save me some time over setting up lpr myself.  It doesn't
work so well that I never have to put finishing touches on the
printcap file manually, but it gets close much more quickly than if I
start from the docs myself.  But then again, printtool has been around
basically forever.

I also made extensive use of Red Hat's GUI tools back in RH 4.2 days,
when I migrated away from the pile of QA-free turd that was Slackware
96 [1].  Reading the source code was a good way--maybe the only way,
as I never found any decent documentation--to figure out where Red Hat
was hiding all my important config files.  Granted, this was probably
not the intended purpose of these tools, but hey....


[1] It had lots of pretty absurd bugs, but my favorite was the one
where /dev/null was read-only.  Caused vi to stop working properly,
among other things.  Clearly Chris was already out of date in 1996, at
least as far as Slackware developers were concerned.

-- 
Shimpei Yamashita                               http://www.shimpei.org/
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?    -- Steve Wright