Easiness rather than enterprise features! [LWN.net]

Easiness rather than enterprise features!

Posted Jun 4, 2005 11:11 UTC (Sat) by nchip (guest, #13292)
Parent article: Red Hat's directory server

I can't see why people think having each application to have it's own
configuration file format, configuration parsing code, distributed to
each individual computer in the network is somehow better than having all
configurations in a single place and format.

I'm afraid the crappy _implementation_ of windows registry has clouded
minds. having cfengine or something similar to distribute settings is way
harder than it should be.

As for fedora directory server, I don't think it needs to beat openldap
in enterprise features, but rather in ease of use and getting started.

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Easiness rather than enterprise features!

Posted Jun 9, 2005 10:07 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (guest, #3071) [Link]

It probably isn't. The issue is coming up with a way to store and access the config that's:
- simple enough for simple apps, from and admin *and* developer PoV
- flexible enough for the needs of complex apps
- admin friendly (you can diff it, use version control, it's easy to see documentation on each and every setting, it's viewable and editable, settings are easy to find, etc)
- developer friendly (easy to use for simple things, doesn't make hard things impossible or horifically ugly, clean & stable client library API shipped as standard with major distros, doesn't make being portable harder)
- relatively easy to port existing apps to
- not going to conflict horribly with the config schemes on other platforms (.plist for OS/X; windows registry) and cause admins to gag in horror at your "weird" app
- ... and no doubt more.

IOW, it's hard. Even once you come up with a good one, you have to convince the devs of existing apps that it's worth their time to port over to support, and that it won't cost them existing flexibility or cause problems for their users. Yeah... not easy.