On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 03:08:58PM -0500, Brent Fox wrote:
It wouldn't be too bad from a coding perspective. Most of the tools that I've worked on have a relatively clean line between the backend that contains all the intelligence and a GUI front end. The idea was that we could write other kinds of interfaces in the future without rewriting the entire tool. We concentrated on GUIs for the most part because that's what we felt was needed by the widest audience. Now that we have a decent set of GUI tools, maybe we can come back and look at doing TUIs for some of the tools that don't have them.
It would be great to formalize the interface between front-end and back-end, so that everything that is done could be captured in a script log. Doing this can be orthogonal to "transactions"; the point being that it should be to copy the script to restore the filesystem (/etc, in particular) to its previous state, and run a script with something like
#!/usr/sbin/redhat-config-foo -f <script-log contents> ...
and achieve the same result. With some light editing/parameterization, I could then do the same thing across a network of machines. I could also check the log contents into a revision control system, along with /etc. Getting the tools to use "arch" for revision control would also be a win. :-)
Regards,
Bill Rugolsky