The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[sean]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 23:20:37 +0100
"Joe Desbonnet" <jdesbonnet at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Sure, or freedesktop.org, freestandards.org etc..   But really all 
that is needed is a defacto standard based on a prevalent solution.  
So talking about it and trying to form a committee etc. is likely
the long way to a solution.

> 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.

No doubt.
 
> 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).

The backend used to store the configuration database isn't really
all that important once you have a standard API which can be used
by applications and CLI/GUI config editors.
 
> To ease migration, adapter modules could be written to dynamically
> translate existing config files to/from the new format.

Yup, and the package Shane mentioned (Elektra) has this.
 
> 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.

I don't think this will actually be a huge step forward or make the
difference to anyone deciding whether to embrace Linux or not.  But
there's no doubt it would be at least nice incremental improvement.

Sean