Slashdot Mirror
How to Fix the Unix Configuration Nightmare
jacoplane writes: "There's an interesting article on freshmeat talking how sorting out some kind of standard for configuration could really help Unix systems could be more user friendly. The article points out that since Apple has managed to build a quite usable system on top of NetBSD, it should be doable to do the same for open-source interfaces."
The part that makes such a system really useful however, is a standard agreement of which information is stored and what it means. This is where the Windows Registry falls down. And Unix is even worse, because all it has is some common soft-of-agreed-upon shell variables, like $EDITOR etc.
Apple is able to do this better because they set the standards for the OS (even more than MS). The can have one central "registry" for something like default associations of MIME-types with particular applications and define an API so every application can use it and a user doesn't have to change his settings in his browser AND his mail client AND his ftp client, etc.
Given the diversity of the unix crowd, the latter seems difficult to me. Maybe they can include it as part of LSB for a start?
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
Because there is only one captain on the ship, Apple. Good luck fixing it in the Linux world. The only way it might have a chance of working IMHO is if such a proposal gets included the Linux Standard Base. Here's a bold idea, why not copy the way Apple does it??? No need to reinvent the wheel...
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
Sure, installing software is easy. Unpack and compile. We are talking about configuring software.
Like getting sendmail to rout and forward mail, apache to serve up web pages you want, BIND to bind names to IP address, etc.
These tasks arn't "hard" or anything, but they do require a lot of reading on the part of a Newbie. In the windows world (don't know much about OSX) Most of that stuff can be done via am intuitive GUI.
Flame me if you want, but I'd greatly prefer a system that didn't require me to learn diffrent config file formats for each service I want to have running... or deal with a hodgepoge of 'easy config' program hacks.
A simple, standard configuration system is definetly the way to go.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'd agree that XML is a good basis, but "XML" really doesn't provide much by itself. It's just a file format that is human readable. If you just use XML with a bunch of proprietary tags, your own XML language so to speak, you really don't gain much over the existing different syntax config files.
An automated tool has no clue what your ipaddress (or whatever) tag means at all. You need to provide additional context for tools to understand the semantics of the configuration data. To make configuration files understandable in a more intelligent sense, you need to either restrict the tags you use to your own configuration language, or you need to provide metadata of some sort.
Why is this intelligence necessary? Well there are all sorts of dependencies and relationships in configuration files. You might want a GUI to let you know if you change something that may break another setting, and so on. Plus ideally you would only allow legal values to be set. Data typing could be done with W3C XML Schema Definition Language, or RELAX NG schemas.
Which brings me to RDF, which I think would be better suited to this task than XML alone. If you use RDF (see http://www.w3.org/RDF/ ) you make it much easier to have a self-describing format that tools can do more intelligent things with than raw XML. While I don't think RDF, DAML+OIL, et al is enough to create a Semantic Web as Tim Berners-Lee is hoping, it _is_ a step in a higher-level direction that will support more intelligence in processing data.
Mozilla already uses RDF for various configuration files and I'm sure there are other applications that do too. Mozilla has a whole bunch of stuff about their RDF here.
XML is just a tree of "stuff" in human-readable format. RDF lets you set up properties and relationships in the data in a standardized way. I don't have a brilliant example to prove this to skeptics, but really it is a better way to represent a lot of types of data you want to be able to query. There are many knowledge bases, expert systems and other query engines already out there using RDF and even higher-level languages like DAML+OIL.
-Kevin
It took MacOS X for people to realize that this was a problem in UNIX? Please.
/etc/registry.conf. There is no reason it has to be binary.
The reason UNIX and UNIX applications are hard to configure, in most cases, is because Open Source programmers are lazy.
This is obviously a blatent generalization so I will explain.
The old adage is that an Open Source program gets written when a programmer has an "itch" they decide to scratch. The problem is that very few people are itched by configuration. You may write the best web server in the world (Apache!) but by time it comes to writing the configuration manager for it the volunteers start falling away.
It isn't very fun writing a bunch of dialogs, windows, buttons and such to make a nice configuration for a program. It's kinda like documentation (and we all know the state of docs for many UNIX programs).
I see examples of this every day. I have a Mac OS X using friend who sends me the URL of every new program he decides to use. It's incredible how many of them are UNIX ports with a beautiful configuration manager stuck on. Mac programmers hold themselves to a higher level of user experience and UNIX people need to get on the boat.
What's needed isn't a global, all dancing, all singing configuration system. What is needed is responsibility in programming.
P.S. Everyone always whines about the Windows registry because it's binary, you can't edit it blah, blah, blah... But the fact is: It works. The average user never cares to edit it because they config their programs from WITHIN their programs. If something is truly needed, do the Windows registry in text file format. Make it