The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Avi Alkalay]

Bill Crawford <billcrawford1970 gmail com> wrote:
> Dunno where you got this obsession, but just because you can represent data as
> "key/value pairs" doesn't mean that's always the best layout.

Maybe not for your or my eyes. The best layout is the one accessible
by the broadest range of ways. Currently, human-readable files are
accessible by human-beings only, or by configuration file "compilers",
that are difficult, unique, that nobody wants to write or maintain
except for the original software writer (e.g. the Samba developer with
the smb.conf file).

The proposed layout is accessible to you by simple reformatting (as
with the kdb edit command, http://www.libelektra.org/Kdbcmd#edit) or
by GUIs (as kdbedit,
http://www.libelektra.org/The_kdbedit_GUI_Admin_Tool), and by any
software that uses a simple API as libelektra.


> There's a reason why programs aren't written for the old Turing Machine, and
> that's that however well it might be able to represent any possible program,
> it's incredibly verbose.

The only reason I can see is historical. Since there is now projects
integration efforts in the OSS world, everybody uses its own format.
So you may think there is a reason, lost in time, but there is
actually no reason why BIND named.conf file look that way, which is
different from /etc/passwd, which is different from smb.conf, which is
different from httpd.conf. Well, the real reason I can see is selfish
developers that enjoy rewriting config file parsing code and invent
configuration file layouts that seems best suited for their apps. But
when you strip the syntax fat, they all are not more than key and
value pairs on a hierarchy.

So to make the discussion productive, please enlighten us with the
reasons you think exists somewhere, or please don't speculate.



> The examples which have appeared in this thread have all made things *less*
> clear afaics.

Again, maybe for our human eyes, but are 100% clear for software. And
the end-goal is leverage better software integration between
themselves, so we, human-beings, will have to look at configuration
element everyday less.

Anyway, for human eyes, I think this is pretty pleasant to see:
http://www.libelektra.org/Screenshots_and_Key_Examples

> Bill"somewhat sick of this thread but suspecting if people don't reply the
> lunatics will end up running the asylum"Crawford.

Or maybe the lunatics are already running it and some people are
trying to take the control back :-)

Avi