The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Avi Alkalay]

On 3/31/06, John W. Linville <linville at redhat.com> wrote:
> > > 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.
>

This is for exporting, or to make backend independent representation
of configuration elements or for your human eyes to see. But for you
to manage, or to be "something appropriate for the given application"
(to use your words), or for other software to interact with it, direct
access to configuration parameters is what will actually happen. You
don't need to convert it to XML or anything else.

Regards,
Avi