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

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 4/5/06, Shane Stixrud <shane at geeklords.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Apr 2006, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>
> >
> > A useful cmdline tool to interact with dbus would go a long long way.
> > Something for dbus which is at least as functional a tool as gconftool
> > is for gconf.
>
> I am curious what type of interactions do you for-see admins performing
> with dbus?  I am not that familiar with dbus but it sounds interesting, it
> is unclear to me how an admin would use it though.

How exactly do i answer that if you aren't familiar with dbus?
I suggest you look at oddjob in Extras, which lets you define simple
dbus clients that wrap common admin actions so that you can
communicate over dbus to fire off those actions. I think if you are
able to understand how to use oddjob then you will understand why I
think having a cmdline tools which allows for instrospection over the
bus would be invaluable to help admins learn how to use dbus
communication effectively. oddjob is the first software implementation
that I've seen that attempts to harness the power of dbus
communications as a tool for sysadmin tasks instead of streamlining
the desktop user oriented experience at the application level. 
Introspection isn't so important when dbus as a sort of back-channel
for application-to-application communication... but its definitely
much more important when dbus is exposed directly as a tool to help
sysadmin's better organize the janitorial crap they have to do locally
on their systems.

-jef