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

[Joe Orton]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 11:20:52AM -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 14:32 +0100, Joe Orton wrote:
> >  it's better to go and write one single tool which can 
> > create flat file configurations from LDAP databases, 
> 
> No, you really really want to change the way upstream software works.

Why?  You're not making a case for that at all.  Why can't you do this 
as an external tool?  That is what upstream say, and I certainly agree.

The end goal ("configure everything via LDAP") is no doubt a worthy 
goal, I don't disagree with that at all.  But if it can be achieved by 
writing one simple tool rather than adding complexity to every daemon 
(for whatever subset of "every daemon" you find interesting), then why 
not do that?

I don't think it's particularly useful to draw comparisons with the 
desktop, FWIW. Things like an HTTP server and an SMTP server are very 
different to X or any UI tool: they do not tend towards a Utopia of 
having "zero configuration" based on proper integration with hardware.

Regards,

joe