The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

sean seanlkml at sympatico.ca
Tue Mar 28 08:52:17 UTC 2006


On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 09:52:47 +0200 (CEST)
"Nicolas Mailhot" <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:

> Le Lun 27 mars 2006 22:39, sean a écrit :
> 
> > No matter what you come up with though, it will be many years before
> > you see wide spread adoption.   If anything, you might consider a
> > project to create a system-wide config editor that knows all
> > the different formats etc and provides a consistent CLI/GUI
> > interface.
> 
> Yay, return of the linuxconf
> 
> It will break for the same reason that linuxconf failed - even a GUI needs
> some config file consistency to work. It will fail like the current
> printer setup fails. If you want it to work conf syntax and GUI/CLI tools
> must be carefuly thought of and aligned, or you'll only produce brittle
> GUI tools which eat  conf files at the first opportunity.

Well, I think the conversation moved past this point rather quickly for
good reasons.  But what I was actually thinking of when I mentioned it was
something much simpler than linuxconf.

The original post by Shane mentioned the limitations of sed when trying to
modify config files.  My notion was of something slightly smarter than
sed that would have no idea of valid key names or values.  Just something,
that could parse a config file and spit out a slightly modified version.   

This might help a bit in his original scenario of trying to create 
installation scripts that need to modify the system config automatically.   
For that, it would at least be slightly less brittle than sed and
provide a standard syntax for modifying any config it knew about.  If
a programmer set out with enough lack of ambition, it shouldn't fall
into the same trap as linuxconf.

Sean




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list