Re: The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Shane Stixrud <shane geeklords org>]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Bill Crawford wrote:

> > > I'd argue that as the number of subnets and special case workstations
> > > goes up, the ability of a system administrator to read and understand
> > > the flat file is going to be markedly harder than for the admin to read
> > > the custom-crafted dhcp-config syntax.
> >
> > And I would agree for the .ini format.
>
> Really?
>
> How does .ini format give you containers beyond the first level? By numbering
> the keys? ugh.
>
> The dhcp config file format is a much better match for a) the way people
> think if they know the problem domain b) allows *hierarchy*. XML at least
> gets that right (and I *don't* think xml is the answer).

I think you misunderstand.  I did not bring up xml or ini files.  I was 
agreeing that a large dhcp config file converted to an .ini file would be 
a mess.

> > But things change considerably
> > when instead we deal with all configuration elements as keys and their
> > values in a filesystem like structure.
>
> And this is the issue. Look at the mess that is SNMP MIBs. Can you read
> those? Can you?

I fail to see the relationship.  We are not talking about the windows 
registry here... in which case the above statement would make sense...

Cheers,
Shane