[sles-beta] Comments on wicked in today's presentations

[Joe Doupnik]

     If I may, this is a better place to make some comments on the 
interesting presentation about wicked today. I will be critical, but in 
a sympathetic way.
     To start with the bottom line as I see things at this time. This is 
an experiment which ought to appear in production a year from now. The 
attempt seems to be to invent a robot which somehow magically makes all 
that "complicated" networking gear disappear behind a on/off switch plus 
a green/red light. That is an interesting goal, speaking 
sympathetically, but first one ought to sort things into simple 
arrangements so that people can easily cope with it. Use of the term 
"complicated" implies, to me, incomplete understanding and that is not a 
proper state for production tools. I am a scientist and I recognise 
partly formed ideas when they appear. Wicked does seem to be in that 
category presently, too early to judge for possible merits but appealing 
in its promise.
     Our discussions on the list about lan device naming and similar 
reflect the realities we have in the field today, being very clear about 
This device does That thing in a form compatible with other parts of the 
system, as well as our need to see that information at it is preserved 
in configuration files. In other words, people are smarter than the 
robot and should win more than an average number of battles with such 
things. To couple the two requires much thinking about what displays and 
what controls each side should have.
     To be fair, I am very cautious about critiquing ambitious projects 
by SUSE because in the end they often turn out to be very clever work. 
An example is snapper, another is zypper, and not least YaST itself. 
Wicked may be, in time. Between that happy end state and now reside our 
servers and our managers, and they are becoming subjects of an 
experiment in progress. OpenSUSE is a normal proving ground for such 
efforts.
     Consequently, my feeling is we need to retain the clarity and 
simplicity of what we have with ifconfig and relatives, let wicked grow 
to maturity and prove its value to our situations, and then create a 
smooth bridge between these worlds. What it is, what it ought to do, how 
one transitions from A to B, and where people fit into the scheme are 
still not well defined, not to me as an end user.

     Additional comments on XML files and similar. I am in the camp 
which says that is for computers to read and write, not for people. The 
current situation is one of creating name-value pairs, so far as I can 
surmise, not complicated hierarchical structures. Classical name-value 
files are for people as much as computers. They work well with people, 
and computers think they are trivial to parse. Thus, why complicate when 
it isn't necessary or desirable to do so.

     Thanks,
     Joe D.