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 12:48 -0300, Avi Alkalay wrote:
> On the other hand, if these softwares are elektrified, you can point
> their configurations to be read from the network, just switching the
> key database backend. This is transparent to the application.

But Elektra is just not good enough for this. You really really want to
change the upstream software to *know* about the fact that it's reading
configuration from a central repository. Said central repository will
contain information that the a node can process in order to configure
itself as part of the cluster. Hence, part of the configuration needs to
contain the site-wide bits. This is important. Do you disagree?

So.. you can never do this with a hack like Elektra. Networking is
*hard*, saying "This is transparent to the application" is just a cop
out since it doesn't handle many important cases such as "what's the
default configuration for new nodes".

In fact, I'd argue adopting Elektra is counter productive to getting
upstream software to start thinking like this and it's why it's so
dangerous to just start adopting Elektra. You can call this an Utopian
dream all day long, but I guess where we differ is that you say Elektra
is one step in the right direction towards the Utopia dream that I think
we share. I argue it's actually a step in the wrong direction. 

Good enough is the enemy of perfect. And in Fedora we should not sell
out and settle for "good enough".

     David