Bugzilla – Bug 1218449
Yast firewall configuration should show zone description
Last modified: 2024-01-08 09:41:59 UTC
Yast firewall configuration holds a description for each zone but this is only accessible by editing the zone configuration. It would help enormously if this description was shown on the table of zones otherwise the description is almost pointless.
You have a very valid point there. Most of those dialogs is just empty space anyway; that empty space could be put to better use.
Created attachment 871611 [details] Screenshot: yast-firewall with toplevel item selected Two thirds of this dialog is just empty space, yet the user doesn't get to see any hint what each of the zones is all about. Some zone names might give a hint, but not all do.
Created attachment 871612 [details] Screenshot: yast-firewall with one specific zone selected When selecting one of the zones, we can see some details about it - what services are known, and which of them are allowed. Since it's the nature of a firewall to block almost everyting with few exceptions, the list of allowed service tends to be very much empty, again leaving a lot of empty space in the dialog.
Created attachment 871613 [details] Screenshot: yast-firewall after clicking the "Edit" button The only place in the whole module where the description of a zone is visible is indeed while editing it - which a normal user should probably not do anyway. When creating a custom zone, this encourages the user to add a description, which is a good thing; but it's pretty useless if that description never becomes visible. But in this screenshot we can also see that most descriptions are much too long to fit in the table; they would always be cut off, forcing the user to do a lot of horizontal scrolling. That would very much defeat the purpose of having it at all.
Created attachment 871614 [details] Screenshot: QDirStat with details panel So I would propose to display details about the currently selected item in a "details" panel very much like shown here. But since the description is wider than it is tall, I would propose a multi-line output field below the table. It would probably make sense to fold the lines into the available width.
I was just pointed to this alternative GUI for firewall configuration: https://software.opensuse.org/package/firewall-config
I just experimented a bit with that one, and no, it also doesn't show the description anywhere. But it's much more complex with many more GUI elements that make it appear cramped and over-complex. It might provide some more options, but IMHO it's intimidating; as a user I wouldn't want to touch it for fear of breaking things.
Moving to our Trello task queue. But please be advised that it might take a while until we find the time to work on it.
(In reply to Stefan Hundhammer from comment #6) > I was just pointed to this alternative GUI for firewall configuration: > > https://software.opensuse.org/package/firewall-config That's more or less the official GUI for Firewalld configuration. But it's only GUI and not TUI. That's the reason for yast2-firewall to still exist. If firewall-config would have worked also as TUI, we would have dropped yast2-firewall when switching from SUSEFirewall to Firewalld.