linux registry (no, not that again!)

[Steve Brenneis]

On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 18:34, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 13:40 -0400, Kenneth Benson wrote:
> 
> > > Because leadership doesn't allow one to start screwing a  
> > > working system. > 
> > 
> > I'm sorry but I don't think what is there now is what could really be
> > called a "working system".
> 
> What's wrong with it?

You beat me to it. The present "system," warts and all, has been working
for over 30 years. It's major weakness was really security and movement
toward solutions like NSS and PAM are making headway toward improving
that.

Actually, an XML-based configuration system is a good compromise. It is
standards-based, it is well-known, it lends itself well to
self-contained or distributed configuration (a standalone system can hit
a web service on localhost or it can just read the files), and there are
any number of ways to make it secure.

We have been using an XML-based configuration system I designed for a
couple of years on a system that consists of about 30 servers and over
600 running applications. It is very stable, very secure, and developers
feel it is easy to learn. The XML works well to model the configuration
state of the application and tools like libxml and gdome make it easy to
program. We have even begun work on a PHP-based system that provides GUI
access to the configuration and makes managing it and controlling it
pretty easy.

-- 
Steve Brenneis <sbrenneis at surry.net>