Why Elektra is the wrong approach (Was Re: The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management)

[Joe Orton]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 12:16:14PM -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 16:58 +0100, Joe Orton wrote:
> > The end goal ("configure everything via LDAP") is no doubt a worthy 
> > goal, I don't disagree with that at all.  But if it can be achieved by 
> > writing one simple tool 
> 
> Because it's not that simple for the user experience that at least I
> think is right.

s/simple tool/tool with single specific purpose/.  This is standard Unix 
philosophy.

You're not making the case that httpd itself needs to be more "cluster 
aware" or whatever.  Your "user story" is great and warm and fuzzy, and 
can be achieved, AFAICS, by writing a tool which generates httpd 
configurations, and IMAP server configuration, and whatever, based on 
some LDAP database.  That tool can do all the tricky stuff like having a 
daemon which polls the LDAP database for changes, knowing when to 
restart httpd into a new configuration, and knowing how to map a 
particular LDAP schema into an specific httpd configuration; it can 
easily scale to supporting lots of different daemons since it's 
basically the same logic for each.  That can all be done without 
destabilizing the codebases of all the daemons you want to support.

Regards,

joe