linux registry (no, not that again!)

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 11:15 -0400, Stan Bubrouski wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 15:15 -0400, John W. Linville wrote:
> > Harry Hoffman wrote:
> > 
> > > This is truly a horrible idea!!! Think about "how well" it works in 
> > > windows. Or think AIX.
> > 
> > I absolutely agree!  Having anything like the Windows Registry for Linux 
> > is a wretched, wretched idea...
> > 
> 
> Yeah why do people want to move to a single config database anyways?  So
> you can have a single point of failure for an entire server and all
> services?  Or so one poorly written app can corrupt it all?  Ya know I
> agree with you guys here.

It does NOT have to be one file.

A libconfig (or something) that exports a standard API that programs use
to look up configuration values.  It writes PLAIN TEXT configuration
files to somewhere in /etc in a consistent format across all
applications that use it.

Most things store config files in /etc right now, so in the _current_
situation, if your /etc/ takes a dive, you're hosed.  I fail to see how
a config situation as described in the above paragraph would be _worse_
than what exists now.

The point of a good converged config project (IMHO) would be a
_consistent_ _file_ _format_ in plain-text files, NOT a binary-only
single-file registry.  People simply don't seem to understand that.

Dan