The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Avi Alkalay]

On 4/2/06, Shane Stixrud <shane at geeklords.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Apr 2006, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> > Fedora's own /etc/sysconfig hierarchy is a good example of how config
> > files can be brain dead simple, hand editable and GUI configurable.
>
> Awww we agree!  Considering that ALL of RedHat's sysconfig config
> files are basically KEYS with values how could I not?  If you give sysconfig
> a bit more structure (directories), have the directory names themselves be
> part of the syntax/semantics and standardized the
> creation/removal/modification/searching and querying of these files in the
> form of a library we end up with....... Elektra

And /etc/sysconfig is RH-specific only, as far as I know. At least the
semantics inside each /etc/sysconfig file. And they imply spliting the
configurations of some programs in two parts. For example, ntpd has
the /etc/ntp.conf and the /etc/sysconfig/ntpd files. This happens
precisely because is very difficult to change these software
configurations directly on their files, so distros were forced to
create a secondary file and a separate whole scripting system to
handle them too.