After an ongoing now 2-week long discussion with Canonical support
regarding some strange behavior involving the use of the proprietary
Broadcom STA driver documented here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1134631
it occurred to me that I have no idea what is actually going on when I
click on various menu options and GUI applets enabling this or turning
off that. This makes it nearly impossible to debug problems like the
one described above.
Although such system administration applets are obviously needed to make
the system usable by ordinary users, it seems clear that by providing
only such an interface, Canonical is effectively taking experienced
users/administrators like myself out of the debugging loop by creating a
huge hurdle between the administrator and the actual kernel
modules/configuration files/etc. that are being
loaded/manipulated/changed; i.e. I don't have time to forensically
determine what is actually going on when I click on those buttons.
Perl/Python/shell scripts are self-documenting; GUI applets are not.
Solution: Provide a text-based narrative documenting each systems'
administration applet which describes exactly what is being done and in
what order when the applet is used. I claim that the very requirement
for such a narrative will vastly improve the functionality of SA
applets, since it will require developers to "think through" the task
being addressed. The upfront cost of adding such a feature will be tiny
compared to the time saved in debugging/maintaining/upgrading it
subsequently, if only because more people will know what is going on and
can contribute to improving/fixing it. In the particular example
described above, if there were a file(s) which explained what is
happening when proprietary drivers are enabled/disabled some user who
can't stand this kind of entropy would have tracked down this bug a long
time ago and a fix would already be scheduled rather than having it
languishing around forever as an annoyance to the experienced and a deal
killer for those who are trying Ubuntu for the first time.
Precedent: Old timers who have worked with IBM AIX will remember
"smitty" or SMIT (System Management Interface Tool), a menu-based SA
tool supplied with AIX. One of the selling points of SMIT was the
administrator always had access to a screen which showed precisely which
commands SMIT was executing to accomplish some task.
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