The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

sean seanlkml at sympatico.ca
Mon Mar 27 21:51:51 UTC 2006


On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 13:43:38 -0800 (PST)
Shane Stixrud <shane at geeklords.org> wrote:

> I do not see it this cut and dry.  There is no line between those people 
> who "know what they are doing" and those who do not.

Well the line is somewhere around the area of those who can look
at a config file and figure it out in a minute or two, and those who
can't.   Anyone who can't deal with today's config files, isn't
going to be any better off with a nice gui version of that
same process.

Another way of saying this is, it's not the config file format
that is the barrier to people configuring their system today.  It's
the contents of those files and understanding what all those options
do and why you might want to use one or the other.

That's why even with Windows where you have a registry you still
need configuration screens and wizards etc.

> I am not saying wizards and interfaces that present multiple change values 
> via am interrogated interface is not valuable.  I am saying their value is 
> greatly amplified by the needless complexities at the lower layers.  I am 
> also saying providing these wizards and interfaces are much more difficult 
> to build pragmatically due to these same complexities.

Well you're right that it would be one less thing a developer would have
to worry about if their was a common library for dealing with any and 
all config files.

> A package designed to take into account other systems can help with the 
> transition, Elektra appears to do this for gconf and I think kde's backend 
> is in the works.  I am not saying Elektra is or isn't the solution, only 
> that a solution like it is desirable.
> 

I hadn't heard of Elektra before you mentioned it and yeah, it looks pretty
good.

Sean




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