> What are the purposes of the lists?
Define and ultimately coordinate a build or some builds. (I think, I'm not the listmaster.) > Scripts for easy the administrator's life? X configs based? Not tied to any display, ultimately, but with interfaces on the console, X and web. > What about discuss LinuxConf, Yast, and other options for Debian dist? There's been a lot of discussion about this on the list, and it is probably a good idea. Originally, though, noone wanted to break anything pre-configtool, so ideas were thrown around about building a sequence of parsers capable of mucking about various config files, and tying them to a single interface layer to a database of some kind. Then various machine and software properties could be set or a desired state be found by the config manager (and implemented.) Yast I haven't heard of. An interesting editorial I looked at the other day said that caldera had a distribution that installed purely graphically, with minimal intervention. The writer did comment that the whole setup was harder to administer in a traditional unix/linux manner, so it wasn't going to please anyone. Earlier, someone was making a pdmenu interface to admintools (like dconfig,) and other stuff, to collect the admintools together and make them available through a single interface. (I'm not sure if someone wrote a gimp version of pdmenu.) That would take care of console and X. Everyone wants it to be completely free, and it has to do whatever it is going to do. The current setup isn't bad at all, unless you are a 100% pure windows refugee. I've been thinking about how to tag the doc directories (Howto and the various stuff together,) but I don't have much time right now. I'm one of those programmers who is writing commercial software for pay (in a nasty little language called visual basic with a not-too-bad database called access,) and I don't have much mental energy left at the end of the day. The engineer who worked on the program before me was a really nice guy, but the thing is just messy. Unix is not hard to administer. Collecting all the info into one place is the harder part (that's where the folks at O'reilly make their money -- support.) Chris