The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Shane Stixrud]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, sean wrote:

> 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.

I would be insulted if I didn't know you were just making a generalized 
statement :).  Who here hasn't spent more than 2 minutes trying to figure 
a missing period in a named conf file, or more than two minutes setting up 
ldap for the first time, or more than two minutes figuring out where to 
find a specific option and value for /etc/modules.conf etc...  The 
problem is each time you touch something you haven't touched in the 
past one must spend significant time figuring out how to make the change 
even if they already know what they want to change.  This is not true for 
all configuration files, but it is for many.  The amount of neurons I have 
dedicated to configuration syntax and where the lists of values and 
their descriptions are stored is many more than I would like.

The "non-initiated" see this as complex and on this specific issue I 
agree, it is more complex than it needs to be.. I am just used to it and 
shrug it off.

If for every "key": its default, possible values (on, off string, float 
etc..) is readily accessible and for every key there is a simple 
description much of this complexity is eliminated.