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

[Shane Stixrud]

On Tue, 4 Apr 2006, David Zeuthen wrote:

> On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 12:48 -0300, Avi Alkalay wrote:
>> On the other hand, if these softwares are elektrified, you can point
>> their configurations to be read from the network, just switching the
>> key database backend. This is transparent to the application.
>
> But Elektra is just not good enough for this. You really really want to
> change the upstream software to *know* about the fact that it's reading
> configuration from a central repository. Said central repository will
> contain information that the a node can process in order to configure
> itself as part of the cluster. Hence, part of the configuration needs to
> contain the site-wide bits. This is important. Do you disagree?

Can you give an example of when one would want to make an application 
aware that it is "reading configuration from a central repository?".  In 
most of the cases I can think the applications care not where it gets the 
data as long as it gets it.  In the cases where it does need to know it is 
a central store, if you are going to have to make the application aware of 
that anyways why not just tag those keys that should/need be centralized 
as such, you could even have a sub-hierarchy under elektra for all of these 
keys i.e. /system/sw/someapp/netcfg/keys
           /system/sw/someapp/otherpaths/otherskeys

Cheers,
Shane