The initial idea behind groups in Skolelinux was to do it as simple as possible. Teachers and pupils should be enough after a good tip from Kjetil Homme that works at USIT. I think Andreas Schuldei came with the idea of independent sys.admin. for maintaining users. Also this is easy and totally OK. Then a teacher suggested a class-map for sharing files in one class. Also this is OK. But then the complexity hits in, and we have to handle strict limitations because of the mandatory limitations in NFS and other real life situations.
The other limitation is the local systsm.admin at schools. A teacher has at most 1-4 hours a week to administrate the users, no more. To administrate users in more than a single level is to time consuming for the 4600 teachers with sys.admin responsibilities at schools in Norway. The third thing is all the good ideas from Kurt Gramlich. Also this is OK, but everything is not implementable at his "oh, they have, we should have" level, and I wrote to him that he has to make a functional, and non-functional requirement-list. From what he writes it seems that he mixes a general student-admin.system with a user-admin.system for computers. This is two different things. You take a subset of data from a student/pupil-admin.system into a user-admin.system, and keep it as simple as posible. It's not a project job in Skolelinux to make a half breed student-admin.system. It's our job to get Skolelinux user.admin as easy as posibly, and not over complicate things. To maintain servers is complicated enough independent of it is Windows or Linux. To put forth to many choices to a teacher who has 1-4 hours a week to maintain the system is a really bad idea. In that way the principal calls the Windows-loving IT-staff in the municipal, and they reinstall Windows as we saw it in a little school north in Norway. To do a long story sort. There they did a apt-get update/upgrade and the net-card module switched place on the thin-client-server. The thin client didn't came up. Instead of calling our people, the municipal IT-staff replaced a fully functional Skolelinux-system with Windows. The only thing that was wrong was the switching of network contacts. When we are operating in a hostile and very Windows-friendly environment, we cant give away our installed based with functionality that verify that Windows-server-operation is more easy. They say so even if it takes months to set up a Windows network with 17 services, and something who looks like Skolelinux architecture. The Windows-Joe's will use every "we are better"-argument when they want to rescue their jobs. In my opinion Kurt Gramlich and others has to cope with this kind of simplicity when suggesting more complexity. It's better to have a simple solution that work good enough with Skolelinux 1.0, then to complicate it further at this stage . Unfortunately we have to move a lot of nice-to-have features down the latter with WLUS. Keep it simple as posible. Please do not mix in to many good ideas where WLUS must mirror the complexity of many groups, projects and so on at a school. The last issue is hiding of complex data. "Dummy" data with no practical use should be hidden because of pretty obvious reasons. People don't use what they cant see, and with not showing it in a user-interface, they don't mess with it either :-) (it's a law in designing Human-Computer Interaction field ;-). If they know an dear to use the command line, they are probably comfortable to mess more with the system, and we have totally freedom here. But as often, with total freedom it comes total responsibilities. Does this makes sense Kurt, Andreas, Petter? :-) I know that Finn-Arne wants to keep the old WLS for release-critical purposes, but we are not there yet, and in my opinion it's more up to Petter to decide anyway. So now I have given my concerns :-) Sincerely Knut Yrvin Projectleader Skolelinux Norway
