Bug#271859: service admin reorders whole boot sequence without asking

[Thomas Hood]

On Sun, 2004-09-26 at 11:46, Steve Langasek wrote:
> In that case, I think it's best to remove gnome-system-tools from
> testing until this is sorted out.  I've tagged the package for removal.


No objections.


Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo wrote:
>  Sorry, but as I can agree with you about service admin module, I have
>  to disagree you again about network adin module. Of course there is a
>  bug in this one which should be fixed, but disabling it is mostly a
>  loss for the novice users, which are the goal of these tools.


I will accept whatever decision is finally made about this.  However, I
do wish to express my opinion that novices are not greatly benefitted by
buggy administration tools.


>  Thomas has some powerful network configuration,
>  which tools cannot cope with right now. As I have said before, I agree
>  that these bugs need to be fixed.


I don't want the best to be the arch enemy of the good.  However, I
think that administration tools should meet certain minimum standards in
order to be considered to be of release quality.  At a mininum, e.g.,
the tool shouldn't break if it encounters configurations that it isn't
currently competent to manage.  This holds especially for tools directed
at novices.  It holds especially, too, when the non-understood
configurations are endorsed by the distribution via its man pages and
reference manuals.

Given that there are valid networking configurations that network admin
isn't competent to manage, I think that either

* network admin should be disabled entirely, or
* network admin should be disabled for writing, or
* network admin should be disabled for writing when it finds an
  /etc/network/interfaces file that is more complicated than it
  is currently able to understand.

I haven't looked at the source but I would expect that at least one of
the above would be reasonably easy to do.

-- 
Thomas