After a little bit of thinking I would say that having a gui install is=20
just one step towards a unifying system interface=2E

As others have suggested maybe it would be better if instead of working on=20
a bastard install program, a suite of tools were developed that all used=20
shared code and had the effect of producing a system by which users,=20
printers, daemons, installations and package removals could be handled=20
under similar interfaces=2E

This is a goal of any system which is meant to be used interactivly by many=
=20
people of varying skill levels=2E

This is a huge undertaking=2E

I like the idea of developing this stuff with a UI layer of abstraction=2E=20=
=20
Have one library that is linked with either curses or gtk might be one=20
solution=2E  Once such a UI library is developed people could sit down and=20
work on tools for user managment, daemon managment, firewall managment,=20
etc=2E with both a gui interface and a text based interface all from the sa=
me=20
code=2E

I think this is the real goal here=2E  Working towards developing a gui bas=
ed=20
installer without such a UI layer in place would probably be a waste=2E

What are your thoughts on this?

Nick Maniscalco
nmanisca@vt=2Eedu