The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Shane Stixrud]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Joe Desbonnet wrote:

> Just fantasising here ... the ideal configuration system IMHO would
> fulfil the following criteria:
>
> 1. For simple configurations it should reduce to a simple key-value
> pair text file, except that parsing rules will be very well defined.
> 2. At the other end of the scale it should handle the most complex applications
> 3. An optional schema definition can define the schema of the file
> 4. That schema can optionally provide enough information to enable a
> configuration file editor to automatically generate a UI to enable
> someone who is not intimate with the application to make changes (help
> text, widget hints etc)
> 5. I18N proof
> 6. Optional modification history and roll back facility. If the
> modification was made programatically, the audit trail should record
> what make the modification.
> 7. Always have the option to edit with a text editor (ie it should be
> easy for a human to read it and edit it)
> 8. API bindings for common languages (C, C++, Python, Java, Perl, bash?)

Add to that list:
designed to to be minimal enough to be desirable for system 
initialization, fstab, modules.conf etc..

A name space that is designed to account for and scale from fstab to web 
apps.

And most importantly every key should be required to have at least a short 
description that is I18N compatible.

Shane