The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[sean]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 13:08:57 -0800 (PST)
Shane Stixrud <shane at geeklords.org> wrote:

> This is not a gui issue, nor is it just an "end user issue".  This 
> attitude of "anyone hand editing config files better know what's going on 
> anyways" becomes largely invalid when a standard methodology exists.

I actually don't buy that.   You don't change anything when you go 
to a standard config file format.   Anyone editing at the file/gconf/
registry level had better know what the heck they're doing.

Everyone else wants a nice GUI that is logically consistent with 
the problem space they're interested in and provides wizards etc
to explain the configuration process. 
 
> Gconf shows the gnome people realized early on having a standard 
> method for storing and modifying configuration data is important, to the 
> gnome platform... We are not talking about JUST the gnome platform and my 
> guess is gconf would not meet the needs of Fedora as a whole.

And that's really the problem isn't it, how do you get KDE, Gnome,
every CLI program, and every other window manager etc to all agree
on one format.   The way it will happen is gradually everyone will
see that someone is winning the fight to provide a backend config
system and will use it.   This might be a good project for
freedesktop.org.

> Projects already exist http://www.libelektra.org/Main_Page for example. 
> The problem is not that code doesn't exist, the problem is one of getting 
> everyone to:
> a) agree its desirable
> b) Agreeing/creating an implementation
> c) having a plan for getting where we want to be "many years" later.

But gconf and gconf-2 and others existed before the package you cite.
Perhaps this one is the end all and be all of config backends.  Dunno.
 
> I don't see how a few people can make this happen, it is going to take 
> some serious influence to make any real world progress.

It might help if the Fedora project "blessed" one particular backend 
config system, but I suspect even getting that decision made would be
a big challenge.

Sean