Why Elektra is the wrong approach (Was Re: The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management)

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le lundi 03 avril 2006 à 14:51 -0300, Avi Alkalay a écrit :
> Nicolas, is very hard to discuss opinions and that was your opinion. I
> respect that, even if I can't understand in what you based this
> opinion.

Avi,

Let's just most software I've seen on the Linux and Windows side (as
part of a closed software editor, as a FOSS and closed software
integrator) cares very little about the rest of the system. It's
oh-so-much easier and cheaper to dump safe (for your bit of software)
values in common config files than test values which won't badly affect
other parts of the system (as a bonus you can crash your competitors
apps sometimes). By being dumb and blind you can save money to implement
crucial bits like putting the company logo on every window of your
configuration app, paint it in company colors, etc (always a wining
point with your PHB, and another reason *not* to integrate with everyone
else)

Sanity happens when it's forced top-down by a coordination point, either
(in the windows case) MS menacing to retire some crucial support bit
(logo, program participation) or (in the FOSS case) some central
software clearinghouse (LKML, xorg, fedora) refusing to include some
bits before things have been fixed up.

The fact every single closed software offering for Linux lags one or two
generations behind in the software integration front (utf-8, selinux,
core fonts -> fontconfig, oss -> alsa...) should tell you pretty clearly
how high playing nice with the rest of the system is on traditional
hardware/software corps agendas.

And your want to give these people the keys to the system conf? Please.
I'm sure you can find saner examples than this.

The only companies I've seen in the business that genuinely cared about
the system picture are infrastructure companies (OS suppliers, tools
vendors like BEA). And they don't need elektra because they already know
the system well enough to patch it as need.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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