Re: SEUL: User Profiles (?)

[Thomas Stinner <thomas@pop-siegen.de>]

On Thu, 29 May 1997, Micah Yoder wrote:

Hello everybody,

i'm new to this list and i don't know what has already been discussed
here. Is there a summary of the list or even a digest available? I'm
really interested in this project and would like to contribute.

> Right, and also I think c and c++ should be included because it's the
> standard compiler for Linux.  If the user downloads something from the
> Internet and it's in source form, he will need a compiler.
> 
> That brings up an idea - would there be a way to have a "compile
> wizard"?  Just download a .tar.gz file and have it uncompress it, untar
> it, and attempt to compile it with the makefile using reasonable
> defaults?  It would work for some things but could be a huge mess with
> others.

This should work as long as a configure - script is provided. it will
break most of the time when it is not. So, maybe we should only try to
compile it with the wizard when there is such a script present. 

There should also be support for rpm - packages, so the need for
end-users to compile things themself is not so high.

But RPM should probably not be our primary package-system. We should make
our own package-system which includes documentation in our preferred
format (html or whatever it will be) that will automatically be indexed
and put in a (possibly compressed) Documentation-Database. I don't think
that RPM's support this (but i'm not sure at this point).

> About databases, I again suggest that we include one, possibly
> PostgreSQL.  It is a client/server system, so that would require that it
> run as a server all the time, but I don't think it takes much memory
> when it's not in use.  

I would prefer mysql (www.tcx.se) as RDBMS. It's much smaller and does his
job very well. It is free and there are ODBC and JDBC drivers available.

> Let's think of other "wizard" possibilities.  Did any of you see the
> most recent Linux Journal?  There's an article about how to get your PC
> to dial into the Internet automatically at specific times.  If we could
> automate that with a simple dialog box, that would be sweet.

I think we should hide all the "painful" (for the end-user) configuration
from the end-user. But there should always be the possibility to fine-tune
or reconfigure the settings manually (in the rc - files for example). And
our "wizard" should recognize these changes. I know, this is not a simple
job - but i hate to manually change a setting here and see that this
changes are gone when a change another setting in a configuration
program. I'm now only changing things manual without using any
configuration program if i'm not sure what it does.

> Too bad we couldn't get voice dictation like OS/2... :-)  Is there a
> university working on such a project for the cause of free software?

There is a project EARS
(sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/sound/speech/ears-0.31.tar.gz)
but it's far from beeing finished.

Till soon
    Thomas

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