The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management
Shane Stixrud
shane at geeklords.org
Mon Mar 27 22:36:11 UTC 2006
On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, sean wrote:
> Well the line is somewhere around the area of those who can look
> at a config file and figure it out in a minute or two, and those who
> can't. Anyone who can't deal with today's config files, isn't
> going to be any better off with a nice gui version of that
> same process.
I would be insulted if I didn't know you were just making a generalized
statement :). Who here hasn't spent more than 2 minutes trying to figure
a missing period in a named conf file, or more than two minutes setting up
ldap for the first time, or more than two minutes figuring out where to
find a specific option and value for /etc/modules.conf etc... The
problem is each time you touch something you haven't touched in the
past one must spend significant time figuring out how to make the change
even if they already know what they want to change. This is not true for
all configuration files, but it is for many. The amount of neurons I have
dedicated to configuration syntax and where the lists of values and
their descriptions are stored is many more than I would like.
The "non-initiated" see this as complex and on this specific issue I
agree, it is more complex than it needs to be.. I am just used to it and
shrug it off.
If for every "key": its default, possible values (on, off string, float
etc..) is readily accessible and for every key there is a simple
description much of this complexity is eliminated.
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