CPU Frequency Scaling

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Mar 5 décembre 2006 13:28, Dan Williams a écrit :

> Human manipulatable != machine maniuplatable

It seems to me the great failure of gconf users was to make this
asumption, and consider that since the settings were available through
gconf-editor there was no reason to clean-up/prettify the XML
representation.

Just as sysadmins need to accept some structure in config files is
required to ease machine manipulation, developpers need to accept
indentation, comments, careful design are required to ease human
manipulation.

There is no inherent reason elements in XML files can not be properly
indented, commented and ordered so diff/patch and manual editing works
(even if xslt + xsltproc should eventually superceded diff/patch for XML
files). It will cost design time, it will cost processing time, but it's
doable.

All the recent profiling ops show massive over-reading and polling of conf
files by GNOME apps. Did we really mess up the config storage layer only
to help applications writers abuse it in every possible way?

> Red Hat tried to do a grand unified configuration project years ago,
> with GUI config tools that edited things like /etc/passwd,
> httpd.conf, /etc/fstab, and many more.  I think everyone would agree
> that having GUI config tools makes Linux more accessible to some portion
> of the system administration audience, but the horrors uncovered by that
> project mean that what we've got today really doesn't work for GUI
> config in most cases.

The main mistake of this project IMHO was to separate machine-manipulable
and human-manipulable versions of the same data, with the two versions
fighting each other constantly. Ironically what is being proposed today is
similar. The only difference being the authoritative version is the
machine-manipulable one this time. It will fail the same way for the same
reasons.

To avoid sysadmin and application disconnect both apps and sysadmins need
direct raw access to the same config data (ie no layer of templating
indirection for conf apps like in the old RedHat projet, and no layer of
gconf tools/scripts indirection for sysadmins like in the current one).
That means the low-level format of config files must be adequate for apps
and sysadmins, not one or the other like has been done so far.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot