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Take This GUI and Shove It

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-ain't-clickin'-here-no-more dept.

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia speaks out against the overemphasis on GUIs in today's admin tools, saying that GUIs are fine and necessary in many cases, but only after a complete CLI is in place, and that they cannot interfere with the use of the CLI, only complement it. Otherwise, the GUI simply makes easy things easy and hard things much harder. He writes, 'If you have to make significant, identical changes to a bunch of Linux servers, is it easier to log into them one-by-one and run through a GUI or text-menu tool, or write a quick shell script that hits each box and either makes the changes or simply pulls down a few new config files and restarts some services? And it's not just about conservation of effort — it's also about accuracy. If you write a script, you're certain that the changes made will be identical on each box. If you're doing them all by hand, you aren't.'"

6 of 617 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Better test! by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ah, but with a script you have a record of what was done.

    True, unless your script was:

    #!/bin/sh
    rm $0

  2. Re:Bad GUI and no CLI: way too common by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    What would be nice is if the GUI could automatically create a shell script doing the change..

    You could probably write a shell script to do that...

  3. Re:Do this with your GUI by Nethead · · Score: 2, Funny

    How, pray tell, do you export that to a CSV file?

    Print Screen and OCR, then write a perl script.

    --
    -- I have a private email server in my basement.
  4. Re:GUIs make documentation hard by Haeleth · · Score: 2, Funny

    GUIs tend to display less information

    I think you'll find a graph can be used to display large amounts of information in a small(variable) area, and it makes the data easier to interpret and anomalies easier to spot.

    That's true, but has absolutely nothing to do with what he said. GUIs do not usually display graphs. They usually display a little message box saying "An error occurred. Please try again. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator."

  5. Re:Better test! by jimjamjoh · · Score: 2, Funny

    i thought you were gonna say "rock star" :( :(

  6. Re:Bad GUI and no CLI: way too common by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    And so you've reached exactly alain94040's point -- a gui (ala Windows's search for files & folders) that can output its resulting find command for the user to learn from.

    Also...

    Cool, now move only the files that end in mp3, do not contain a number in the name and are between 10 and 60 days old. I bet the CLI starts looking might fast then.

    I dunno -- is it faster to do nothing with a CLI or a GUI?