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

[Shane Stixrud]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, David Zeuthen wrote:

> In particular we don't need a all-generic system like Elektra here. And
> you really want your web server process (e.g. httpd) to know that it
> reads configuration from the remote end to fix all the corner cases in a
> nice way.

Here is where we disagree.  What you are proposing is a network 
configuration database which in certain cases I can certainly see 
the benefit.  However it makes much more sense to standardize / unify 
configuration at the system level and then using a backend to 
export/import this data to LDAP.  This eliminates the single point of 
failure, less over head, less complexity for normal case and only one 
program needs to be LDAP configuration aware.

> I'm not saying this is easy. But I am saying we need to be a lot more
> ambitious than e.g. Elektra. I agree this is a very difficult problem
> space to navigate in, especially because of the very bazaar nature of
> open source. It's definitely fixable if we get the right architecture
> hashed out to begin with.

Here is where I think the disconnect is, I agree that a network 
configuration database is a good idea in theory.  I just think the 
implementation you describe could be better.  Elektra and any system 
designed to be a generic system level configuration engine shouldn't be 
any more ambitious then it needs to be.  It would be easy to add the 
functionality you are talking about if fedora was 100% elektra 
enabled.

Cheers,
Shane