The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Jon Nettleton]

On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 15:39 -0500, sean wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:33:50 -0800 (PST)
> Shane Stixrud <shane at geeklords.org> wrote:
> 
> > I find it hard to believe no one else sees the current 
> > complexity of system/application configuration as undesirable?  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?
> > 
> > Linux is perceived to be "difficult" to configure and managed by many, 
> > this is not because we lack guis and wizards, rather because one must 
> > discover the process each subsystem and application uses to 
> > accept configure directives from its users.
> > 
> > I see no reason why it would not be possible and desirable to have a 
> > plain text compatible configuration file standard that is universal 
> > between subsystems, services and applications (besides it being a lot of 
> > work).  It seems to me that the complexities of existing configuration 
> > tools (authconfig, system-config-samba etc...) are largely due to this 
> > same fundamental issue.
> 
> 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.
> 
> gconf already provides a reasonable way to change settings from the
> command line and via GUI tools.   What would you change?
> 
> 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.
> 
I started designing this type of system.  A gui config editor/manager
with it's own config languages, that used translator plugins for all the
different config file formats out in the opensource community.  It is
really an ugly massive project, that is useless until you get all the
translators written.  The scariest problem that forced me to give it up
was not just maintaining the translator plugins, but maintaining the
translation rules for the different versions of config files for the
same app.

Just thought I would chime in.

Jon