Oron Peled wrote:
I don't have a solution. It was an example. I used words like "e.g.". Did I say I had the scheme ready? Why are you trying to catch me on very specific _details_ instead of arguing about the idea/principles? My points are clear:So Allon presented one flaw in your assumptions and you came with a solution for this *specific* flaw...
1. There is no standard config API in the Unix world
2. As a result, every application (or group of apps) implements a kind of the API itself, resulting in a huge duplication efforts. Very few have a decent one, most are primitive. Same is true for system-level apps, call them daemons/services/whatever
3. As a result, there is no well-defined scheme of storing system configuration data, resulting in a large number of redundant parameters which must be synced externally. There is no even a well-defined _place_ for storing the config data (/etc is full with non-config stuff and some config files are placed e.g. in /var)
4. As a result, there is no satisfactory (full functionality, same look-and-feel) configuration tools. The existing ones (YAST, Webmin,...) are essentially collections of independent modules
When you code in C and the same few lines of code appear more than once, you extract it into a function. When the same #define is used more than in one module, you extract it into a header file to make sure the definition is consistent across the application. Does anybody disagree these make a good coding practice? But is it special to C? Is it special to programming? Of course, not. Why shouldn't the same principles be applied to the configuration issues? Yes, the life is not easy and sometimes you do have two almost-identical functions (e.g. for performance reasons). But these are exceptions.
Do you honestly believe that Unix has reached its usability peak? If not, why should the config stuff be an exception? Yes, the life isn't simple and will never be. But it's not a reason to not try to make it simplER.
Regards,
Evgeny
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