The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Shane Stixrud]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, sean wrote:

> GUI users don't want to be hunting through text files anyway, they
> want nice settings windows and wizards.   Anyone hand editing config
> files better know what's going on anyway; the current situation isn't too
> bad there.

This is not a gui issue, nor is it just an "end user issue".  This 
attitude of "anyone hand editing config files better know what's going on 
anyways" becomes largely invalid when a standard methodology exists.

>
> gconf already provides a reasonable way to change settings from the
> command line and via GUI tools.   What would you change?

Gconf shows the gnome people realized early on having a standard 
method for storing and modifying configuration data is important, to the 
gnome platform... We are not talking about JUST the gnome platform and my 
guess is gconf would not meet the needs of Fedora as a whole.

>
> 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.

Projects already exist http://www.libelektra.org/Main_Page for example. 
The problem is not that code doesn't exist, the problem is one of getting 
everyone to:
a) agree its desirable
b) Agreeing/creating an implementation
c) having a plan for getting where we want to be "many years" later.

I don't see how a few people can make this happen, it is going to take 
some serious influence to make any real world progress.