[gentoo-dev] Gentoo Desktop Research meeting report

[gentoo-dev] Gentoo Desktop Research meeting report

[dams]

Hi,

Last week we had our first meeting covering gentoo desktop research. You can
read it here.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/research/meeting_reports.xml


For better research, we need to gather informations about any gentoo
installation project, or config tools project. If you have done something
related, please mail us.

Thanks

-- 
dams

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Desktop Research meeting report

[Karl Trygve Kalleberg]

> For better research, we need to gather informations about any gentoo
> installation project, or config tools project. If you have done something
> related, please mail us.

For Gentoolkit, I'm (still) working on:

1) Rewrite all utils that deal with /var/db to go through Portage
2) Common colours, man pages standards, options, terminology across all tools
3) Merging of superfluous tools
4) Proper text-mode and X11 UI for etc-update.

The next step would be:
1) Make the gentoolkit python module available to third-party tools
2) Integrate etc-update with libconf in some fashion
  - We want better traceability of config changes, perhaps even graphically.

In the long run, I'd like to have a fairly well-documented, common interface
(in various languages) to dealing with administration of a Gentoo Desktop 
installation.

That is, I want to be able to
* do most of my configuration using robust, graphical tools
* remotely configure and administrate my box, either by editing
  the config files directly or using text-mode config tools or attaching
  a gui front-end over ssh
* have full traceability of changes done to my configuration, both
  by myself and by the system.

The reason I think this fits under "Desktop Research" is 
* desktop installations have a high package turnaround (frequent updates,
  frequent installation of new packages, and removal of same)
* they are often managed by non-gurus (which is _GOOD_; we want Gentoo
  to become generally accessible over time), who don't want to use vi for four
  hours to get their IrDA stuff working.
* we don't have a good system for this yet, and it's not obviously clear how
  to handle it, but we have a collection of sysadm tools, some of which live 
  in Gentoolkit, some of which have made it on their own (epm, ...).

For servers, one usually has a low turn-around of packages, it's usually
configured and maintained by people who know what they are doing, and these
people prefer/are comfortable with editing the config files by hand.


Kind regards,

Karl T

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list