The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Shane Stixrud]

>
> I am completely missing the point of this letter I realize.. but
> doesnt your "The Right Way" also hide all the complex things too. It
> either does that or removes a lot of functionality that some admin
> needs to complete a job in a slightly different environment... which
> means enforcing that everyone's enviromental needs matches what you
> are laying out. I have to cover 8 different field environments and
> tasks that require that the same tools do something slightly different
> each time. Now I can build 8 versions of the same tool that reuses 90%
> of the same code or I can increase the complexity of the each tool to
> cover all cases.

I did not say gconftool-2 should be the the solution, only that it 
shows how a single tool can be very powerful when it has a standard file 
configuration file format to work with.  I am by no means 
advocating using xml as the standard configuration format, it is way over 
kill in my opinion.

Nothing is hidden by standardizing config files, I am not implying they 
should be hidden in a binary file.... nor am I implying they couldn't be 
edited with sed or vi although that would likely be inefficient when 
compared to using a tool designed to manage configuration data.

Please provide an example of how this would harm your ability to:
"cover 8 different field environments and tasks that require that the 
same tools do something slightly different each time"

Perhaps you are just confusing my story of what lead to my conclusions 
with my actual suggestion?


Cheers,
Shane