>as an outsider I have little influence on sun internals >but as a user I can't emphasize enough the difference between >being able to use a unix text applications to maintain >a collection of configuration files as a unit, and then apply them >as a unit, vs. point and click for each 1 / ~10K option settings >for each 1 / ~100 applications > >just think how much harder it would be to replicate and then tweak >x11 configs between os upgrades > >if syntax/validity is an important issue then provide >command line lint application(s) to weed out errors in bulk > >as a case in point, (at&t) uwin installation is done via shell >scripts and unix file and text applications that work directly on >the registry, which is mounted as a filesystem -- doing this via >windows apps would have cost the sanity of a few researchers
We are certainly not taking about replacing text config files with GUIs; rather replacing them with CLIs. So they can be scripted and run by thousands in parallel. The one remaining obstacle is operating on alternate roots and running on older releases (which is an issue for Solaris with live upgrade, as explained). It seems we've invented two mechanisms for this: the GNOME "postrun" stuff and the SMF "upgrade" file; that certainly is one mechanism too many. SMC also used a similar mechanism which was broken in various ways. So while CLI-over-vi offers protection, it does complicate matters and for some reason the "alternate root" mechanism is always bolted on later and then turns out to be broken or unscalable to some extend. Casper
