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

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 16:58 +0100, Joe Orton wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 11:20:52AM -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 14:32 +0100, Joe Orton wrote:
> > >  it's better to go and write one single tool which can 
> > > create flat file configurations from LDAP databases, 
> > 
> > No, you really really want to change the way upstream software works.
> 
> Why?  You're not making a case for that at all.  Why can't you do this 
> as an external tool?  That is what upstream say, and I certainly agree.

I suspect that neither you nor "upstream" is looking at user stories.

> The end goal ("configure everything via LDAP") is no doubt a worthy 
> goal, I don't disagree with that at all.  But if it can be achieved by 
> writing one simple tool 

Because it's not that simple for the user experience that at least I
think is right.

Here's a user story:

 "The administrator David got a message from his boss Brian that the
  employees are complaining that it takes too long to send email. David
  looks at the load graphs and says they need more hardware to handle
  the growth of MiniCorp Inc. David purchases a dual Xeon XYZ box and
  plugs it into the network. It automatically joins the IMAP and SMTP
  server clusters and starts serving mail to users. David uses the
  system admin console to finetune the load balancing of the servers
  on his cluster and checks that average response time for the IMAP
  service is now 0.2 seconds, down from 0.6 seconds. David sips some
  coffee and is happy."

Does it really have to be more difficult? I think not. 

> rather than adding complexity to every daemon 
> (for whatever subset of "every daemon" you find interesting), then why 
> not do that?

Because it's *hard* and if you look at what user stories are desirable
it's just not that simple.

> I don't think it's particularly useful to draw comparisons with the 
> desktop, FWIW. Things like an HTTP server and an SMTP server are very 
> different to X or any UI tool: they do not tend towards a Utopia of 
> having "zero configuration" based on proper integration with hardware.

Sorry but I think this is totally unambitious. Near zero-configuration
of server daemons, clustered or not, is indeed possible and there's even
a whole vertical market for it. 

What I'm saying is that instead of doing half-baked solutions like
reading one server config at a time via LDAP we should be approaching
upstream projects and make their server software cluster aware.

What's wrong with that?

    David