The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management
Shane Stixrud
shane at geeklords.org
Sun Apr 2 11:20:07 UTC 2006
On Sun, 2 Apr 2006, Shane Stixrud wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Apr 2006, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>
>> But why is the gdm conf file such crap ? Is this because gdm writers had
>> not lots of advanced configuration file libs at their disposition ?
>>
>> No
Yes, arbitrary key names and value types do not limit the
programmability or user intractability in _ANY_ way what so ever. Poor
key names and values are SUBJECTIVE and thus can only be judged good or
bad by their tendency to cause understanding or confusion.
>>
>> It's because they consider :
>> 1. the conf file is none of the user business
>> 2. as a result little thought went in key naming
>> 3. and even worse the keys themselves are not stable from release to
>> release
No, it is because naming is subjective in nature and what seems like a
good name to an author might not be statistically a good choice for the
masses. Btw the same holds true for configuration syntax and it is for
this reason that a simple syntax that maintains all of the depth and
functionality is superior to a complex custom syntax.
Cheers,
Shane
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