Why Elektra is the wrong approach (Was Re: The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management)

[Avi Alkalay]

Nicolas, is very hard to discuss opinions and that was your opinion. I
respect that, even if I can't understand in what you based this
opinion.

In my opinion, if you provide an environment where softwares can
cooperate in the configuration layer (which is software's personality)
and define some standards and policies for chaos minimization (which
is reflected by this driver handling centralization from your example;
we are not talking only about HW drivers), the ecosystem of integrated
applications and ways to work will increase everyday, leveraging
richer user experience and friendliness. You may have even tools that
help you clean the chaos. My opinion is based mostly in observable
evidence on what happened in the Windows world (the good parts), and a
bit of intuition.

Thank you,
Avi

On 4/3/06, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
>
> Le Lun 3 avril 2006 17:11, Avi Alkalay a écrit :
>
> > What if my mother only wants to install a new multimedia keyboard in
> > her standalone Linux box? She'll have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf? Or
> > wait for the distribution's HW detection tool to know how to handle
> > that? Clearly the best solutions is to let the HW provider know that
> > X.org configurations are pretty predictable in any distribution, and
> > it just have to provide some scripts to precisely integrate itself in
> > X.org configuration schema, instead of having to "compile", understand
> > and regenerate /etc/X11/xorg.conf only to install itself.
>
> Avi,
>
> I agree with much of what you've written lately but here you're back in
> lala-lala land.
>
> You can't have several entities sharing the same object (here entities are
> xorg and your mythical keyboard manufacturer). It *always* ends bad
> because the first reflex of the keyboard manufacturer will be to
> "canonalize" the conf to something it tested (and testing is expensive so
> don't count on a complex canonic setup), lower various tuneables to
> workaround its product bugs, and generally destroy the settings the
> mythical mouse manufacturer put in the configuration.
>
> Having central clearinghouses that mediate between actors (LKML, xorg,
> distributions) is a very powerful feature of Linux distributions (you'll
> note ms has been increasingly centralising driver handling in the last
> years for this very same reason). Your manufacturer should push its
> changes upstream instead of expending resources trying to workaround the
> system.
>
> In other words, your "fix" is worse than the "problem".
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Nicolas Mailho