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

Horst von Brand vonbrand at inf.utfsm.cl
Mon Apr 3 20:49:16 UTC 2006


David Zeuthen <david at fubar.dk> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 02:48 -0400, Horst von Brand wrote:
> > David Zeuthen <david at fubar.dk> wrote:
> > my view is that if we solve
> > > it for desktop then the server bits will pan out mostly by itself.
> > 
> > No, the problem spaces are different.
> 
> Doesn't have to be.

OK, so configuring a DNS server has to look exactly the same as setting up
the theme for my window manager...

[...]

> > So you advocate not configuring the web server via files, but remotely via
> > LDAP? How is that different from "configuration files"?

> It's different insofar that since you already serve configuration from
> the LDAP server it's next-to-trivial to use the same mechanism to
> actually change the configuration. Hence, it's a lot easier to write a
> single configuration UI (or whatever) that all distros can use.

OK, so you use a generic LDAP browser/editor to change configurations. What
makes that better than using $EDITOR on text files? I see massive
disadvantages (LDAP becomes a requirement to even start the machine
usefully, network breakdowns make everything freeze, one more service to
worry about on a server type machine, ...) and the only advantages I see
are a single configuration syntax (but the underlying semantics stay as
messed up as today (if it doesn't get even worse), so this doesn't help
that much) and the possibility to distribute configurations all over the
place (which normally is jut a single machine, so not too much of a gain).

> In particular we don't need a all-generic system like Elektra here. And
> you really want your web server process (e.g. httpd) to know that it
> reads configuration from the remote end to fix all the corner cases in a
> nice way.

I /don't/ want any more complexity in a web server process, it has to
remain auditable (and as independent of external sources as possible, for
paranoia's sake).

> > In any case, this is system-wide, just that your system is larger than one
> > box.

> Terminology. That's what I call site-wide.

Then I really don't get it. 
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513




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