linux registry (no, not that again!)

Havoc Pennington hp at redhat.com
Thu Nov 4 01:13:16 UTC 2004


Hi,

Here is a post of mine from a past thread:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gconf-list/2004-April/msg00024.html

And what I would consider wrong with gconf:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/plans.html

Like all "grand unification scheme" efforts, without consulting and
listening to the major customers, success is unlikely. e.g. when Keith P
succeeded with fontconfig, he talked to and then contributed patches to
GTK, Mozilla, Qt, etc.

I would avoid lumping system config with per-user config. They are in
some ways the same and in some ways very different.

For per-user config one set of issues is around group policy, directory
services, and that kind of sysadmin-creates-user-profiles issue; the
other set of issues has to do with how the desktop is implemented and
what UI we want, for example you need change notification.

For system config the real issues of interest IMO are the overall
management tools; things like cfengine, lcfg, oneSIS, or RHN.

Another useful conceptual difference is between setting up a
service/workload and associated data (e.g. configure apache, or
stressing the analogy you could say that a user login session is a
workload) and makework config such as telling the machine how to find
its hardware (modprobe.conf type of stuff). The latter can/should be all
automatic in an ideal world, though in a real world it can't be fully
so.

You might think of the makework config as adjusting all machines to be
the same, and the service config as defining a service that can then run
on any of the identical machines.

User and system config can conceivably be addressed in the same library,
as they share some core features, but I'm not convinced it has genuine
value to keep them together.

Anyway. This is certainly an area where work is useful, but I think it's
a long road that involves both listening and coding in order to get wide
adoption.

Havoc





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