Mohammed obaidan wrote:
[...]
My grain of salt :
It is your time you will be spending, and how you spend it is up to you.
So I do not want to discuss whether it is a good idea or not, or whether
you can or cannot or should or should not do it.
This is thus just a personal opinion, to add to the list for your
consideration.
If you have a look at the graphical configuration interface for IIS, you
will see that it is a fairly complex piece of work. Lots of dialogs,
lots of tabs, lots of options, etc..
Yet in that case, we are talking about a commercial product made by one
company, following rather strict guidelines of what things should look
like, what users expect, how pieces interact with one another, etc..
Apache, being something made by lots of volunteer people, much more
independent of one another that MS employees are, with a lot more
freedom to think along their own lines, is a different animal. The
basic principles of the Apache configuration are fairly standard. But
each module used within Apache has a bit of its own logic when it comes
to configuration, which parameter fits with which other or not, and how
they interact with the basic Apache and with other modules. In addition,
although the Apache httpd team does a great work of orcherstrating the
releases so that in the end there is a usable and reliable product, each
module still has much its own life and its own release schedule.
So in the end, I believe that making a generic tool that would handle
all of these differences would be very complicated, and very
time-consuming to keep up-to-date.
About the point of creating an interface that would help configure the
basic Apache, but not the individual modules :
As some people have pointed out before, basically every operating system
nowadays already includes an Apache package, managed by the standard
"package manager" of that OS distribution. Using that tool, a system
manager can install/deinstall/upgrade a basic working Apache within a
couple of minutes at most. Adding or removing an Apache extension
module is almost as easy in most cases, and in many cases adding or
removing a VirtualHost also.
But, at least in 50% of the cases, the basic Apache configuration is not
enough, and one needs a series of the extension modules to be configured
according to a very specific configuration and usage.
In my view thus, it is more at the level of each extension module,
rather than at the level of the generic Apache configuration, that a
better interface would be useful.
If I'm not mistaken, that's what webmin is about : it provides a kind of
generic "framework" where one can plug in different modules, as long as
these modules follow some basic rules. I don't know if webmin's logic
is adaptable to Apache extension modules, but if it is, that's the
direction I would follow. And if it isn't, then maybe defining such a
generic interface, where each Apache module author can just easily
"plug-in" his own graphic management module for his own extension
module, would be a worthy enterprise.
In the end however, there is another aspect.
I believe that the users/managers of software like Apache, and
users/managers of software like IIS, have fundamentally a different
point of view and approach to such issues. People who like IIS and its
graphical interface, are generally people who grew up with Windows and
its graphical interface. They consider this to be the "normal" way of
things. They are prepared to sacrifice a bit of understanding of what
is really going on behind the scenes (e.g. in the dark corners of the
Windows Registry), to the facility and ease of use of a graphical
interface that makes things simpler on the surface.
On the other hand, the people who like Apache as it is now, like to know
exactly what is going on, and are prepared for that to go through the
sometimes tedious editing of configuration files by hand with a text
editor, knowing that by doing so they can really drive the process
exactly like they want, without some kind of "wizard" popping up and
pretending to be smarter than themselves.
So the thing is, assuming you would create such an interface, would
there really be a public willing to use it ?
Considering that for the people that just want to install and configure
a basic Apache, it is already easy on most systems; and considering that
due to the nature of Apache and its modules, it is always going to be
very hard to create a graphical interface that satisfies the needs of
the more finicky others, I personally doubt it.
But then, for some system administration tasks, I also enjoy the
facilities offered by some graphical interfaces, so maybe I'm wrong.
Good luck anyway.
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