It *is* human readable!

Posted Nov 30, 2004 18:46 UTC (Tue) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

I get that, however thats not the impression I got from the Press Release. I'm all for a decent config method however my exim example is still an valid one. The mapping to key/value pairs (with individual comments) is not the most useful for context. Compare:

# This director handles forwarding using traditional .forward files.
# It also allows mail filtering when a forward file starts with the
# string "# Exim filter": to disable filtering, uncomment the "filter"
# option. The check_ancestor option means that if the forward file
# generates an address that is an ancestor of the current one, the
# current one gets passed on instead. This covers the case where A is
# aliased to B and B has a .forward file pointing to A.

# For standard debian setup of one group per user, it is acceptable---normal
# even---for .forward to be group writable. If you have everyone in one
# group, you should comment out the "modemask" line. Without it, the exim
# default of 022 will apply, which is probably what you want.

userforward:
  driver = forwardfile
  file_transport = address_file
  pipe_transport = address_pipe
  reply_transport = address_reply
  no_verify
  check_ancestor
  file = .forward
  modemask = 002
  filter

to

/userforward/driver = forwardfile          # the driver is a forward file
/userforward/file_transport = address_file # the file transport is an address file
/userforward/pipe_transport = address_pipe # the pipe transport is an address pipe
..
..

Do you see my point? Don't misunderstand me. I think Elektra is a valuable contribution to FOSS configuration and doing things like the X.org patch set is a good way to introduce the system to the world. However I don't think we will see an end to the monlithic configure file either.