For some tasks, GUIs can be useful. Maybe even for most tasks, _if_ they can serve at least three levels of users (novice, intermediate, expert) equally well, can (as AIX's "smit") optionally show command-line equivalents, can log sessions (to do postmortem on how the user screwed up), and can capture command-line equivalents (to use the GUI to generate scripts, with possible use of a "wizard" to aid in parameterizing them), and preferably, in expert mode, offer access to all the options that the command line version would have.
I have yet to see any GUI that really does the above, although otherwise hideous AIX's rather nice "smit" tries hard. I suspect some of that comes from IBM's experience with text-based forms type interfaces (like mainframe ISPF), where one really has to think through the interface, as contrasted to someone with limited human factors knowledge (which I don't pretend to have, as I spend far more time with computers than humans :-( ) using a GUI builder to whip out something pretty and easy for low-end users as quickly as possible. However, IMO a command-line form should always exist, and exist first, because that's the simplest case (in terms of development) of exposing the functionality, and because one can use a command over a 1200 baud serial line or in other very reduced circumstances, like partial failures. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
