Derek Fountain wrote:
sigh... the thing is, *I* have a degree in Computer Science, plus 10 years experience in working in programming with sh, C and Java and Unix computer system administration - all on various platforms of Unix. I have YET to see any command line commands that can not be duplicated with a well written text menu or GUI.
I have yet to see a decent text or GUI mechanism for creating shell pipelines - UNIX or Windows. Regular expressions are another one. Writing GUIs for simple commands isn't that difficult. Converting the power of the UNIX shell into a GUI is not yet possible, and maybe never will be. I would suggest that anyone who thinks it's just a case of arranging enough buttons doesn't really know the power of the shell interface.
You can suggest what you like. NeXT and AIX (which is from the company you apparently work for) both have had decent sysadmin tools (not great, maybe but nice none the less) long before they were thought of in Linux. I loved that you could see the underlying commands that would be run when you used AIX's system administration tool (I can't recall its name at the moment). This made it useful for those who began system administration in another system to pick up the new flavor easily and be able to write scripts that were targeted to other needs. Anyone who thinks shell commands can't be well scripted has not seen the powerful and useful scripts available. I've written some and seen many others. This does not mean that such a system would be fast. But I've seen people be thrilled with the availability of a front-end and suffer through some slowness rather than have to figure out the underlying system. CVS is an example. As for GUI's, its much more than a few buttons, but it's do-able. Any GUI would of course by much more useful and powerful if the underlying tools were written in such a way as to be able to link them in and be able to do exception handling rather than having to be concerned with system()-, or pout()-type calls and catching text or an exit code from the system, but they are do-able none the less. Don't get me wrong, I love the commandline for the fact that I *CAN* write scripts I think are useful to me. But I don't want to do that for trivial things - I think that should be provided by the system itself. And without GUId front-ends (as well as useful tools and fun games), the mass market will remain uninterested in linux.