Jeff McCune wrote:
Theoretical discussions are all fine and well, but SA's will be paying good money to attend the upcoming workshop. I believe everyone involved should strive to help these SA's solve the problem they need solved: automating their tedious manual processes. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
That assumes that "what we now do" is "what we need to do." I tend to disagree. In fact, I think that if we continue to think that way, the autonomics guys *will* replace us with computer programs:) The idea of defining configuration management as automating manual things is compelling and tempting. But if we actually solve that problem, that will not solve the problem of configuration management completely. If we constrain ourselves solely to automating manual processes that exist now, we also constrain ourselves to the limits of those existing processes, which are constrained by what a human can accomplish, not what a machine and a human together can accomplish. e.g., we would never ever conceive of checking global consistency of large configurations, because that is not a tractable manual process... But we don't do that now, you say... But I disagree. We use the trouble-ticket system... But that's too late... systems are already down... So if we keep thinking that way, we *can* be replaced by a computer program that is superior to us simply because it has a better view of what's going on... So if we define "practical" as "bottom-up", we may close the door on ways tools can serve as a lens with which we can view our systems, in ways that there is no reasonable technique for accomplishing manually. -- Dr. Alva L. Couch Associate Professor of Computer Science Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Tufts University, 161 College Avenue, Medford, MA 02155 Phone: +1 (617) 627-3674 Web: http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~couch _______________________________________________ lssconf-discuss mailing list lssconf-discuss@inf.ed.ac.uk http://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/lssconf-discuss
