> Even better, my program will (optionally) show the user which commands
> it's executing, and as much as possible, use the tools in /sbin and
> /usr/sbin rather than directly talking to the OS.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

I have dealt with lots of obscure machines (including AIX) and the one thing
that always irked me about SysV vs. BSD is the basic philosophical divide:

    SysV: You'll never understand the system anyway. Hit any key to continue.
    BSD: You've got 'man' and 'ls /etc' and a working brain. Go to it.

Can you tell which machine I prefer to deal with in the long term?

I would _love_ it if the admin utility clued me in to exactly what it was
doing, even when it merely edits files, so I have some idea where to start
looking when something horrible goes wrong and I suddenly find myself
unable to run the admin utility.

Even better is if it can dump out scripts instead of running the commands.
Then I can hook up a row of disks and run scripts to format, sysinst, flesh
out, and otherwise set them up one at a time, and then go home. Or boot a
row of blank machines one at a time and have them all download their new
genetic material over the network.

I can expand on this (a lot), but it's starting to get off topic.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com