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

[Bill Rugolsky Jr.]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 12:25:12PM -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> Uhm, no one is forcing you to use NetworkManager just yet so there is
> not really any regression. Btw, the price we pay to support two
> networking configuration stacks is higher than you think.

By two networking configuration stacks you mean the traditional method
and the NetworkManager way?  Wouldn't it have been better to have
an actual design ... rather than thinking up a GUI interface to some
use case, then starting coding?

Pete's condescension is right on target: core Linux components are
being replaced by people who, by their own admission, "hate Unix."

It seems that an "unusual requirement" is one that is difficult and
inconvenient for that other operating system, i.e., a requirement
that foregoes the monkey pressing buttons in front of a
bitmapped display.

Unix/Linux carries years of baggage, mis-designed features, and half-baked
implementations.  But today's GNOME hackers seem to have completely
missed the value of (1) text, (2) tools, and (3) domain-specific little
languages and protocols.  One area where Unix went somewhat astray is
that script and config syntax differences created unnecessary impedance [the
original point of this thread] -- the Lisp machine folks had that much
right.  Two decades later, it's easy to see that domain-specific languages
are best built without inventing lots of arcane syntax; these days S-exprs
have been replaced by XML, XSLT (*vomit*), and worse.  Unfortunately,
simply stuffing name/value config pairs in a file is not the same as
domain-specific design.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for support for 20-year-old
"unusual requirements" to be bolted on later.

	Bill Rugolsky