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

Davide Bolcioni db-fedora at 3di.it
Wed Apr 5 07:59:14 UTC 2006


Bill Rugolsky Jr. wrote:

> 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."

Well, the former goes hand in hand with the latter, apparently. There
is a saying: "Those that don't understand Unix are comdemned to
reimplement it ... poorly".

> 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.

The irony is that legacy operating systems are moving in the opposite
direction, introducing text, tools and domain-specific little languages.

> 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 have been replaced by XML, XSLT (*vomit*), and worse.

In my experience, XML does not really work for domain specific languages
because it is too heavy on syntax baggage for humans - it is best
thought of as textual XDR: good for program-to-program data interchange.
I believe your reaction to XSLT confirms this.

> 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.

Davide Bolcioni
-- 
There is no place like /home.




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