Configuration systems
I just saw the announcement of figurine 0.0.0 (obviously quite new :-))
It sounds as if the guy has read the linuxconf discussion here, except
that he doesn't say so. His goals seem awfully familiar.
To quote a bit:
[...]
It MUST use standard Unix text configuration files.
This means no Windows-registry-like system or similar monstrosity. Unix
has survived for a long time with readable and hacker-friendly
configuration files, and I don't want to see this change. Many people
(myself included) really like being able to fully configure a Unix system
via telnet.
It MUST NOT totally rebuild text files every time.
This makes it much more difficult to alternate between text-editing and
using the GUI. Slackware's network configuration (which totally
rewrites your network configuration with a totally new set of options each
time) is the extreme case of this, of course. Modern Linux install sets
like
Debian and Red Hat do a much better job.
Some systems load, for example, the fvwmrc options into an internal
database the first time they are run, and use this database to generate
the fvwmrc
on subsequent runs. This is wrong. It assumes that everyone will want to
use the config program all the time; in Unix, we must NEVER assume this.
Comments and formatting in sections of the config file that are not
changed should be left alone.
It MUST NOT replace existing system components.
Some systems suggest that you totally modify your system startup scripts
so that they can handle the starting/stopping of all the right daemons
automagically. This may seem like a good idea at first, but I believe it's
beyond the scope of a configuration program to control how you do this.
This is
against the Unix way of doing things, IMHO.
[...]
See <http://www.foxnet.net/~apenwarr/figurine/>.
MfG Kai
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