The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Shane Stixrud]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Jeff Spaleta wrote:

> whether or not elektra is the right solution will be decided by
> whether or not individual upstream software projects start working
> towards integrating support for elektra as their default configuration
> scheme.

This reasoning is flawed and I think it illustrates an example of where 
our Darwinist Meritocracy has difficultly dealing with problems that are 
global and counter to our evolutionary path.  Tell me, what motivators 
exist for any project or even groups of projects to adapt a 
non-standard 3rd parties configuration schema??  None, in fact I am 
sure there are plenty of reasons NOT to adapt such a thing. When 
looking at this issue from within a specific microcosms perspective it 
makes perfect sense why UNIX and Linux have failed to create this standard 
API after 40+ years of evolution.

It is when you look at GNU/LINUX as a whole that this problem becomes 
obvious and it is for this reason I think Fedora/freedesktop/LSB/FHS 
or some other entity with ties to the system as a whole will have to 
champion this standard. A global configuration scheme has little benefit 
until a large portion of the system is using it, until that threshold is 
meet it is but another configuration format adding to the systems 
complexity.

> And why are they bothering with SysVinit at all...

My guess is because at the time they did the patches this debate was not 
hot.  It seems they treated sysvinit as a proof of concept that 
libelektra is usable even at the earliest stages of os initialization.