FC3 (and beyond) wishlist

Peter Backlund peter.backlund at home.se
Tue Jul 20 17:49:16 UTC 2004


On tis, 2004-07-20 at 12:11 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Thomas Vander Stichele (thomas at apestaart.org) said: 
> > Here are some examples:

[snip]

> > All the tools that rely on a single configuration file invariably end up
> > having lots of hacks applied to them from various rpm scripts (lilo.conf
> > in the past, grub.conf, apache configs, modules.conf, ...) to edit
> > existing files, hopefully remove old entries and replace them with
> > current ones, failing badly in the process.  The easiest solution is for
> > these snippets to be in separate files managed by the package installing
> > them.
> 
> True, but it certainly could lead to conflicts depending on how
> much it's used. For things like aliases, it really shouldn't be
> used much at all.
> 
> Bill

I just noticed that char-major-195* is indeed included in modprobe.conf.
dist, but is aliased to the old module name "NVdriver" instead of the
current "nvidia". Quick modutils fix anyone, or should I file a bug
(upstream or RH)?

The approach of using one file per configuration entry instead of one
monolithic config file is IMO better in most cases, and several
applications have adopted this fairly recently (apt, ld at least).
I think it would be beneficial to do this in as many cases as possible.
Candidates include:

- modprobe (debated)
- grub
- yum
- prelink
- Others?

Basically, when you have a configuration file with several independent
"blocks", and order isn't important, it's better to split it into
several small files.  

/Peter  





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