| |||||||||||
Elektrified X.org releasedElektrified X.org releasedPosted Nov 30, 2004 22:42 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)In reply to: Elektrified X.org released by evgeny Parent article: Elektrified X.org released
The filesystem is stable. It has to be. Otherwise your configuration gets corrupted whatever you do.
However why replicate so many features that the file system already give you in a database? Or in 2500 implementations of 50 different configuration formats.
(Log in to post comments)
Elektrified X.org released Posted Dec 1, 2004 10:03 UTC (Wed) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] > The filesystem is stable. It has to be.
I see no reason why a DB should inherently be less stable.
> However why replicate so many features that the file system already give you in a database?
Because FS will never provide me with all the advanced features one expects from a decent configuration system - not without stacking dozens of extra daemons/utilities/... on top of it, at least.
> Or in 2500 implementations of 50 different configuration formats.
Of course. I said it in the beginning, that I like the _idea_ itself - to replace the whole current zoo of config approaches with a single API. It's the _implementation_ that seems to me a dead end.
Elektrified X.org released Posted Dec 1, 2004 16:23 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] How do you create different permissions on different part of the database without a priviliged daemon (or something uglier, such as a SUID root binary) ?
This is an important requirement: user applications need not run as root to read configuration. But there should be a place for the secret data.
But please name one thing a database provides that a filesystem doesn't. What database exactly (daemon? file-based? which one?)
Elektrified X.org released Posted Dec 1, 2004 21:37 UTC (Wed) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] > How do you create different permissions on different part of the database> without a priviliged daemon (or something uglier, such as a SUID root binary) ?
Depends on the implementation. For a DB _service_ (a daemon running) it's solved like for any other similar problem (and there is no need for it to run under a privileged account - e.g. slapd on my server runs as an unprivileged user 'ldap', yet system-wide authentication works fine). For a simple file-based DB like SQLite it can be solved by splitting the whole data into a few files (1 - writable by root, readable by everyone; 2 - r/w by root ony, plus, similarly, two files per user account).
> But please name one thing a database provides that a filesystem doesn't.
Expressions (aka views). E.g. SELECT * FROM user WHERE user.id > 400 - to have a list of "real" users - used, for example, to send an announce email. Etc. Other things are replication, atomicity, true locking, notifications, rollbacks, versioning, transparent remote access, scalability (in _both_ directions). You get all these for free with a decent RDBMS, and NONE of them with an existing filesystem.
Elektrified X.org released Posted Dec 2, 2004 22:55 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] > > But please name one thing a database provides that a> > filesystem doesn't. > > Expressions (aka views). E.g. SELECT * FROM user WHERE > user.id > 400 - to have a list of "real" users - used, > for example, to send an announce email. Etc.
OTOH, the strict typing of the data will get back at you when you try something like:
grep -rl /home/joe /etc/
> Other things are replication,
Try rsync
> atomicity, true locking,
What about filesystem-level locking?
> notifications,
Change notification for a directory is available.
> rollbacks, versioning,
Put arch/subversion in there (cvs probably won't do as it does not support renames)
> transparent remote access,
Add a remote-access daemon. Quite simple to implement. You have to figure out the authentication method first. Currently practically no existing daemon intgrates well enough with the system.
> scalability (in _both_ directions).
Filesystem access is quite scalable
Elektrified X.org released Posted Dec 3, 2004 19:42 UTC (Fri) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] > OTOH, the strict typing of the data will get back at you when you try something like:> > grep -rl /home/joe /etc/
Sorry, I didn't get what you meant.
> Try rsync [etc etc etc]
I don't want. For the same reason that nobody in sane mind will pipe 'telnet 80 | html2txt | less' to browse the Web. Possible - yes. Great when nothing else is available - yes. But call this THE ultimate browser?!
|
|||||||||||