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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