[bind10-dev] Usability glitches

[Michal 'vorner' Vaner]

Hello

I talked with Shane yesterday and we got to conclusion we're running out of
„critical“ A-team tasks slowly and I mentioned that the software isn't making it
easy to use. He asked me, if I can provide a list with some specific points, so
I played with it a little bit. Here is what I came to (I'm not saying we should
do everything from it right now, just stuff I find annoying). That is by no
means complete, we might have tickets for some of those, etc.

• The default port cmdctl can't be changed and defaults to 8080. This took me a
  while the first time, because I had a squid proxy on that port, so I had to
  change setup of few other programs to free it. I think this should be
  configurable trough a parameter of Boss (having it in config isn't of much
  use, because you can't change the config without it running).
• Boss's argument -f no longer does anything, as the server to forward to is
  from config of resolver and start of resolver from config of Boss.
• The start_auth and start_resolver from Boss's configuration is not reflected
  immediately, it requires a restart of Boss (therefore the whole system).
• Cmdctl, as the only module, has print_settings that does the same as config
  show Cmdctl. It is confusing.
• It would be nice to have some help describing elements of configuration as you
  browse it and, inside a dict, have the list of possible sub-values. Every time
  I want to set the Auth/datasources, I need to search the documentation to know
  the names of the dicts.
• Auth and recursive servers have different ways of configuring ports and
  listening addresses. Maybe we could unify it somehow. Also, the 5300 default
  port is nice for development and testing, but not really good for
  production/user.
• We currently have one masterfile parser in C++, one in python, both of them
  are limited. That might be surprising for the user that the same master file
  works in one but doesn't in the second data source. Also, we maybe could
  „borrow“ the masterfile loader somewhere, that thing must already exist in OSS
  world, and I think we don't need anything special about it.

I send it now, so you can have a look and think about it if it is any use for
discussion during splint planning.

Have a nice day

-- 
Let me show you my collection of bugs.

Michal 'vorner' Vaner
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