Instructions from Fedora on fixing the dbus problem [LWN.net]

Instructions from Fedora on fixing the dbus problem

Posted Dec 13, 2008 18:27 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Well, I don't like its XML-happiness very much at all, and one thing this
fiasco does indicate is that the XML that sysadmins are expected to modify
(e.g. in system.conf) isn't documented well enough.

(The very thought of requiring sysadmins to modify XML to configure
anything makes me break out in hives: XML isn't meant for humans to write
and is way too easy to make mistakes in. But fontconfig lost me *that*
argument long ago, and in a sense so did Apache, although at least an
HTML-like syntax makes some sense in a web server's configuration file.)

Instructions from Fedora on fixing the dbus problem

Posted Dec 14, 2008 5:04 UTC (Sun) by Ze (guest, #54182) [Link]

(The very thought of requiring sysadmins to modify XML to configure anything makes me break out in hives: XML isn't meant for humans to write and is way too easy to make mistakes in. But fontconfig lost me *that* argument long ago, and in a sense so did Apache, although at least an HTML-like syntax makes some sense in a web server's configuration file.)

Whilst I'm not a huge fan of XML either. It's not that hard to edit an existing XML file. I've edited HAL files recently and done web stuff (XHTML,HTML,JSP,XSLT,DTD's,VRML) in the past from scratch without any hassles.

Yes often documentation is sadly lacking in them but that is common in most projects whether they be open source or not.

Honestly though I'd like to see something better , ideally a config fs module that stores everything in a common format/back end but can export it in a wide variety of different formats with rules deciding which format it's exported in. So the format you edit it in isn't necessarily the file format your program reads it in. That should satisfy most people and result in projects not having to change much code.

Instructions from Fedora on fixing the dbus problem

Posted Dec 14, 2008 5:05 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

If it's well documented then it's pretty do-able.

When I get tired of Metacity's crack-headness I usually retreat to the warm embrace of OpenBox.

Openbox's configuration, while rather intense, is actually quite easy to deal with. Every aspect of the WM's interaction with the mouse or keyboard is configurable. Each field is independently configured.. like title bar vs decorations vs window vs desktop etc etc.

A example entry would be like this:
<keybind key="W-d">
<action name="ToggleShowDesktop"/>
</keybind>

And it would be in the 'keyboard' section that is simply bracketed by this:
<keyboard>
blahblahblahblah
etc etc etc
</keyboard>

As far as the keywords and such the combination of the examples included in the default configuration and the good documentation on Openbox's website means that if I want to find out how to do something I can usually figure it out and have it working in a couple minutes rather then fumbling around in the dark for a half hour or more google'ng around and hoping somebody has some working snippets posted to some mailing list somewhere.

See:
http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Help:Contents

Then you can find what the 'ToggleShowDesktop' does at:
http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Help:Actions

> Hides all windows so that the desktop is visible, and gives focus to the desktop window if one exists (such as in GNOME and KDE). You can also use the action again to show the windows again, if no windows have become visible yet.

And gives a example on it's usage.

---------------------------

the only thing that sucks about it is that XML is wordy and all that, but that's something that can be worked around with a good text editor.

I suppose I am just saying that a decent text configuration file with good documentation and usable syntax is good while a text configuration with bad syntax and no documentation is a nightmare no matter if it's XML or what.