On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 01:37:37PM -0600, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: > On Wednesday 26 November 2008, lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote about 'Re: > Erase cache, clean registry in Linux': > >The tendency in Debian to split up configuration files --- like for > >apache and exim4 --- and to spread them over several directories and > >to have the system automatically mess with them has already gone too > >far. Just try to figure out how to configure exim with that system --- > >it remains cryptical, and it's far easier not to use it. Apache was > >also easier to configure before it was messed up. > > I find wrangling a lot of small files with self-documenting names a lot > easier than fighting with a one large file made larger by the number of > comment lines needed to explain the role of different sections.
Well, I won't rely on the names, what matters is what the file is doing. And with many files that are somehow combined, it's very hard to keep track of what is actually configured and what not. In case of the exim configuration, these files are not even human readable, and the documentation isn't good. The comments are a good thing because they (can) explain you what the option is for/does and what the possibilities are. I find that easier to read than having to go somewhere else, to look up the meaning of options in various documentations, and then to go back. If there is a number of options, I have to go back and forth all the time, find those options in the docs, then find another one, and so on. That makes it take a lot longer and much more difficult. Besides that, who says that I would want some automatic system mess around with my configuration? It might do things I don't want it to do, and I might not even know about it. In case of apache, the automatic configuration keeps producing a warning message about a virtual host not having a name. I gave it a name, but now the warning says that there are no virtual hosts. If the configuration wasn't messed up by being split, I wouldn't be too lazy to configure it correctly because it would be so much easier, with all the information needed for that right there in one place. But because it's split, I would first have to find out how it works, browsing through a lot of documentation if that is available and trying it out; then I would have to find out how to configure it correctly, browsing even more documentation. Still it would remain very difficult because I have no idea what the configuration actually looks like, i. e. what it would look like if it was in one file --- since it isn't, I have no way to see how it's actually configured. That just sucks. > Prior to your message, I didn't think anyone actually liked > non-split configuration files for exim4 and apache. I guess it's a > matter of taste, Yeah, maybe ... I tried several times to figure out how to configure exim using the automatic configuration, but it just isn't possible. The documentation doesn't explain it, the resulting files are not readable, and it leaves me screwed. It's so much easier to just copy over the example configuration and adjust to what I need. > but monolithic files are certainly harder for multiple packages > automatically maintain. Yeah --- but that must not lead to making it harder for humans to maintain the configuration. It's already impossible for apache. Is there a way to tell the apache configuration system to create me a single config file that I would be able to maintain? And if there were changes to be made, can the system tell me what changes it wants to make as a suggestion so that I can put them into the configuration? -- "Don't let them, daddy. Don't let the stars run down." http://adin.dyndns.org/adin/TheLastQ.htm -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
