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Re: Configuration (File) System



On Thursday 18 March 2004 10:48, Jens Hermans wrote:
> Currently I'm working on a technology to be able to represent
> configuration files as filesystems. The whole thing is outlined at
> http://users.pandora.be/paranet/CFS.htm , but I'll try to sumarize it
> shortly in here. (Note: the source is not online, I'll try to upload it
> someday near to developer.berlios.de , project CFS)
>
> Basic concept of the whole thing is that you can mount for example your
> apache config as a filesystem and then be able to edit your config just
> by using FS functions (open/read/write/..). The configs will be parsed
> and converted into a directory structure, in which files represent
> single configuration parameters. Comments & whitespacing will off
> course be preserved, to prevent cluttering up your custom config too
> much. (more details, visit the above url)
>
> I think this could be an interesting technology to use in combination
> with debconf, eg. get rid of all those "search & replace in config
> file" configurations that are used atm.
>
> I welcome all your comments, thoughts and participation on cfs.
>
>
> tia,
>
> J. Hermans

Why not using the filesystem instead of a config file in the first place 
to store key - value (or key - list of values) pairs? I think of 
something like (content of the file in parentheses as example)

/etc/myfancypackage/buffersize       (1024)
/etc/myfancypackage/maintaineremail  (hugo@willi.org)
/etc/myfancypackage/makebackups      (yes)
... and so on.

(Think of /proc/sys/kernel as an example, too).

Then everything is in one (filesystem-) namespace and no fancy "config 
file parsing" is needed. This "one namespace" is one of the ideas behind 
reiserfs (see www.namesys.com).

Regards,

	Tilo



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