The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Joe Desbonnet]

I think the only way this will happen is for a consortium of interests
in the Linux (and similar OSes) world to come up with a formal
standard (file format, best practices and API bindings for common
languages). Then cast it in concrete by submitting it to a standards
body eg EMCA.

If the standard is good then I believe people will use it. Parsing
config files is tedious and error prone. Often developers forget about
things like international characters and have to change the format
after a few releases.

At it's simplest this standard could be a simple name-value pair text
file. But it should also cater for complex configurations and allow a
schema to define and describe the file (and perhaps the GUI used to
edit it).

To ease migration, adapter modules could be written to dynamically
translate existing config files to/from the new format.

This would be a huge step forward for Linux. Right now the /etc
directory is littered with different formats. Many are not documented
outside of the source coded used to read them.

Joe.


On 3/27/06, Shane Stixrud <shane at geeklords.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, sean wrote:
>
> > GUI users don't want to be hunting through text files anyway, they
> > want nice settings windows and wizards.   Anyone hand editing config
> > files better know what's going on anyway; the current situation isn't too
> > bad there.
>
> This is not a gui issue, nor is it just an "end user issue".  This
> attitude of "anyone hand editing config files better know what's going on
> anyways" becomes largely invalid when a standard methodology exists.
>
> >
> > gconf already provides a reasonable way to change settings from the
> > command line and via GUI tools.   What would you change?
>
> Gconf shows the gnome people realized early on having a standard
> method for storing and modifying configuration data is important, to the
> gnome platform... We are not talking about JUST the gnome platform and my
> guess is gconf would not meet the needs of Fedora as a whole.
>
> >
> > No matter what you come up with though, it will be many years before
> > you see wide spread adoption.   If anything, you might consider a
> > project to create a system-wide config editor that knows all
> > the different formats etc and provides a consistent CLI/GUI
> > interface.
>
> Projects already exist http://www.libelektra.org/Main_Page for example.
> The problem is not that code doesn't exist, the problem is one of getting
> everyone to:
> a) agree its desirable
> b) Agreeing/creating an implementation
> c) having a plan for getting where we want to be "many years" later.
>
> I don't see how a few people can make this happen, it is going to take
> some serious influence to make any real world progress.
>
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