Re: variable list in database
>>>>> "AT" == Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
AT> Or a server with four printers, or serving a couple of Samba
AT> shares...
I guess it's time for a cautionary note - I don't think that it
would be wise to have an exhaustive configuration database. In many
cases, and I suspect printers and /etc/printcap would be one of them,
there are quite a few variables that could and/or should be set, and
it seems non-sensical to keep them in a meta-format in a configuration
db and also in a single file per machine. I suspect that it would also
be somewhat inconvenient to maintainers to write configuration scripts
for - although using configuration frontends removes the need to write
clumsy sh-based parsers, you still need to inspect the data and check
for consistency. If your variables have a lot of interdependencies,
this would rapidly get messy.
Anyhow, we already have a conffile mechanism. One possibility is to
extend this so that conffiles are optionlly stored and fetched from
the db as a whole.
Advantages include that in the case of printcap, squid.conf etc, the
file is entirely opaque to all bar one program. There is no need for
anything else to set or alter variables within it. A major
disadvantage is that introduces another completely orthogonal method
of maintaining configuration state.
m.
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