Why Elektra is the wrong approach (Was Re: The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management)

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 11:50 -0300, Avi Alkalay wrote:
> In my opinion what you write is currently, unfortunately, plain utopia.

Not at all, we're doing this for the desktop already!

This effort is actually called "Project Utopia" :-). Developers love it
(both GNOME and KDE adopted the base technology). End users love. Admins
tend to somewhat hate it sometimes because "It's new. It's different.
And we're always angry." :-) 

And for the 1% to 2% use cases we're not there yet so some people with
also hate it. We're getting there and, hey, this is open source and we
take patches.

<snip>

> We need to take a lof of steps to achieve the desired utopia you
> outlined. Elektra is a small first one.

I just tend to think Elektra is way too generic to be really useful
IMHO. What I think you want to do is to engage in a discussion with each
upstream project and try to work out the use-cases on how their software
is used. 

As a matter of fact, I believe that for e.g. Apache a lot of "vertical
software" exists (both as proprietary and in-house solutions) for
managing clusters of web servers for example. Wouldn't it be nice if
Apache adopted one true way of doing this and we could all focus on an
UI configuration optimized for this instead of some random Registry
Editor?

It's not utopia, it just requires a lot of hard work and effort to do
things right. I tend to believe that if you don't do things right the
first time you will never get it right because "good enough is the enemy
of perfect" or something. 

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

    David