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."

Comments

XML as a starting point perhaps?

[andykuan]

In the writer's outline section he has a few bullet-points that scream "XML!" (I'm paraphrasing here):

1. A core system to handle parsing, verification, etc. -- If app configs were based around XML, you could use any of a dozen XML parsers out there.

2. A configuration format description file. -- Hmmm, sounds like a DTD...

3. OS-neutral. -- XML was meant to be portable from the get-go.

The other items lined up pretty well with what XML is all about as well. Anyway, that said, I'm not so sure this'll ever happen since, from a developer's point of view, it's a lot simpler to slurp in a bunch of lines from a text file with fgets and chop it up into words than to have to somehow link in a third-party XML parser.

Some Stupid Questions

[heideggier]

Would it be possible to get rid of dotfiles? While alot of people like them I don't know why you couldn't have a ~/etc in the home dir. I get lot's of weird looks when I say, you keep all the configurations in /etc but user config's in dotfiles. There's must be a good reason for this could someone please explain

On that thread what the hell is /usr/etc used for, or /usr/local/etc? won't it make more sense to move /etc here instead?

Do we really need a central registry type file like the article proposes, surly isn't a front end enough, I can't understand what difference this would make. Having a central file which contain's everything like System.dat seem's to be a major security floor in windows since if you can crack that file you pretty much have root on the machine. Not being able to set different permissions for something like fstab or shadow would be pain. Although to be fair the article proposes it as a backup. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Apart from these questions I think that this was a pretty good/fair article, although I thought that it was a bit unfair to compare linux to windows/OSX since they are completely different OS and something like creating a central config app might work to make linux less customisable IMHO. Most distro's tend to have app's along these lines anyway, what the hells wrong with DrakConf?.

Re:Don't confuse Syntax and Standards

[j7953]

I would think that is rather easy, use some kind of XML and you're already halfway there.

No no no. XML is not the magic solution to all problems in communication, data storage and usability. Using XML does have many advantages for some applications, like communicating over the internet, but I don't see how

<DocumentRoot> /some/path </DocumentRoot>

is so much more usable than

DocumentRoot /some/path

The only thing XML will do if widely used for configuration files is make maintaining them harder for those who'd like to do that by using shell scripts or simple text editors. As a very basic example, using XML makes configuration files harder to grep. The above example might also be written like this:

<DocumentRoot>
/some/path
</DocumentRoot>

This is completely legal XML, but if you grep DocumentRoot this file, you'll get the following result:

<DocumentRoot>
</DocumentRoot>

which is probably not what you wanted.