on /etc/sysconfig

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Lun 18 juillet 2011 20:57, Lennart Poettering a écrit :

> No. There is no need for a directory that replaces /etc/sysconfig. It's
> borked. If a daemon has not configuration file but should have one, then
> fix the daemon, don't fake a configuration file.

Well, really that's a bit rich comming from you, when PA configuration files
are such a mess one can't even change the number of speakers without risking
weird crashes the next time PA is updated (because if rpm keeps the old config
file, the new PA with choke on one of the old options, and if it replaces it,
the speaker number will be silently be reverted to 2).

sysconfig files have one *huge* advantage they're abi-stable because they've
been written by distro people not by upstreams that care little about
stability or userfriendlyness. People have spent a lot of time identifying and
extracting the minimum settings that need changing by users and that make
sense regardless of the service version, and presenting them via standard
shell syntax, and nice key names.

Too many upstreams stuff everything in giant config files that can not be
sanely managed and need user review every time the software is updated, which
is all the time on a Linux distro. Too many upstreams use weird one-of-a-kind
syntax just to prove their 'leetness, even going so far as not using # to mark
comments (what's the point except annoying users). If you want to prove
something use xml, it's ugly too but at least one can feed it to an xml parser
that will point syntax errors instead of wasting people's time (ie there is a
point to the uglyness).

sysconfig files may not be nice technically but most users would like more of
them, not less.

It's easy to say "let's dump those ugly things, they offend me". Could you
please spend some time designing and documenting what should replace them
first? Or are we going to revive the unit files mess, where old LSB init
scripts were broken before the documentation to write unit files was
published?

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot