The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Davide Bolcioni]

Shane Stixrud wrote:
> I find it hard to believe no one else sees the current complexity of 
> system/application configuration as undesirable? 

Just my $0.02, since this is a question which I often hear from Unix
newcomers, especially from Windows ... the current complexity is more
apparent than real, it still undesiderable, but not to the point that
just any apparent solution to said complexity would be adopted
willy-nilly. The problem is not that the current situation is optimal,
but that all proposed alternatives are subpar. At least as far as I
can tell from my personal experience thus far, YMMV.

> Is this problem too 
> big to be addressed?  Is there too much historical precedence involved?  
> Or is there a solid technical reason for not having a standardized 
> configuration file format?

There isn't, because the problem is not with the technical approach IMHO
but in the users, developers and administrators using the system, so the
current approach is best *social* compromise for an enviroment where
none of the involved parties is able to dictate policy.

Developers don't want to devote resources to configuration file
handling, because they force the use of configuration to paper over
deficiencies in their code in the first place; administrators don't want
to risk a system which they cannot control and fix; users don't want to
learn configuration files at all. So users change as little as necessary
in textual files which the administrators trust they can fix over a 9600
baud cellphone ssh session in a format the developer never bothered to
design in the first place.

Thank you for your consideration,
Davide Bolcioni