The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[John W. Linville]

On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 03:52:10PM -0300, Avi Alkalay wrote:
> On 3/31/06, John W. Linville <linville at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 01:30:12PM -0300, Avi Alkalay wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > ...except that configuring a name server is a differnt problem domain
> > than configuring user accounts, than configuring a file server,
> > than configuring a web server, etc.
> 
> I thought we were talking about the syntax, and not semantics.

Using a syntax that doesn't correspond to the semantics makes things
harder, not easier.

> > Migrating thousands of Unix-oriented applications to XML-based
> > (or similar) configurations schemes, only so that you then have to
> > develop new tools for each application to turn the XML config file into
> > something appropriate for the given application, just makes no sense.
> 
> Yeah, this really makes no sense. Thank God we are clever enough to
> not walk in the path your imagination just described.
> But it would help if people understand what we are trying to do first,
> and after that make public criticisms that make more sense than your
> based-on-nothing statement.

http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2006-March/msg01755.html

	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.

I don't know how I got the idea that you wanted to change configuration
file formats, then use new tools to make them human readable...

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville at redhat.com