[Info-vax] Suggested DCL enhancement

[John E. Malmberg]

On 11/4/2020 12:21 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 
> IDE usage and management UI usage and app user interface designs are all 
> shifting developers and administrators and networking folks and 
> end-users away from the command-line, too.

I have been doing devops on and QA automation on Linux and windows for a 
while now, and I can assure you that it command line is the dominant 
method used for actually getting stuff configured and doing functional 
tests.

GUIs are find for end users at admins that have to deal with a few 
systems, but when a small collection of systems to manage is at least 
100, anything requiring or using a GUI is PITA.   And I have been 
routinely dealing with much higher numbers of systems.

Much of GUI testing is running the system in a "Dead Rodent Mode" from a 
command line session and if needed scanning a screen shot to validate 
that the requested operation succeeded.

All the linux systems that I am involved with are serial console only. 
  The only time a monitor is connected to them is when a crash cart 
needs to be connected.

Quite a bit of Microsoft Windows automation and Android automation is 
command line based.   Tools like SikuliX are fall backs for when that is 
the only method available.

Cygwin along with Samba is still heavily used for Windows automation 
because it is easier to automate the setup and install on new system 
than remote powershell, especially on older versions of Microsoft Windows.

While the end user may see a GUI, where the work actually gets done or 
troubleshooting gets done is usually on the command line.

I don't see that changing any time soon.   Only the newest server 
systems have a remote KVM included in the BIOS, and again, that is only 
used when we can not get into the system any other way.

What is heavily used is one of in no particular order, Ansible, Chef, 
Puppet, etc., as configuration control methods.   And these all are 
wrappers for command line access.

If you are designing a system or application to be managed with a GUI 
instead of those methods, you are going to be hurting your market share.

Regards,
-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net_work