systemd: Is it wrong?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sun, 10.07.11 11:49, Chris Adams (cmadams at hiwaay.net) wrote:

> 
> Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> said:
> > In this case there are sound 
> > technical arguments against configuration by command line argument or 
> > environment variable
> 
> I haven't seen any, just statements that they are somehow "bad" and the
> new way is "better".

Here are a number of reasons:

- You cannot really sensibly add comments to command lines
- Reading and writing shell scripts is much harder for UIs than
  configuration files
- Shell scripts are very verbose and hard to read, and you need to
  understand shell to do so, hence they are not user friendly, except
  for seasoned Unix admins
- Shell scripts are slow
- You cannot just scp config files between hosts because you don't have any
- Configuration parsing errors are not helpful, not helpful at all, and
  the traditionally don't end up in syslog
- Configuration options like "-f" or "-i" are not easily understandable
  and especially not self-explanatory
- It's trivial to hide security holes in config parsing shell scripts
- IFS, error handling is difficult, and so on

And that's just the most obvious reasons why env vars, and cmdline args
and faked shell-based config files are not particularly nice. I came up
with this in 1min thinking. I am pretty sure I can come up with about 100 more
if you ask me nicely.

Anyway, I figure this is a religious thing, and you cannot argue with
religion, so I'll shut up.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.