This is great example...

Posted Nov 21, 2011 7:48 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Hmm... Interesting. Where is the list? by dlang
Parent article: That newfangled Journal thing

Well, Web shows both sides of the coin.

1. Web essentially killed the closed alternatives (AOL, Compuserv, MSN, etc).

2. Few years after that happened web itself was overrun by packages with binary-only configs or GUI-only configs (forums, blogs, social networks, etc).

If you'll think about it then you'l see it's natural succession: geeks started the web and in the early phase the ability to mix and match was the key to success. Later, "normal" people have come and they don't need text config and protocols so they were moved to backstage (where sysadmins can still tweak them but most of the population can not).

If Linux wants to conquer user-facing devices it needs to become more robust and thus less flexible (flexibility begets uncertainty and uncertainty is primary enemy of robustness). If it wants to keep server side then it needs to keep flexibility. This is interesting dilemma, but so far it looks like only a handful developers care about robustness thus I think it's premature to start campaign for "true UNIX way". There are enough distributions which (like Gentoo or Slackware) keep UNIX traditions alive...

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This is great example...

Posted Nov 21, 2011 9:48 UTC (Mon) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link] (5 responses)

AFAIK, even those GUI-config web tools still mostly write into a config.php file or something, which is still plain text.

Alex

Nope...

Posted Nov 21, 2011 12:19 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

Usually you have something like setup.php which writes textual config.php with username, password, etc. But it's just a few lines of remnants of "UNIX heritage". Usually you are supposed to delete setup.php after initial configuration and never touch config.php at all.

Other configs, all the logic, etc - everything goes to the insane mess of SQL tables or (if it's modern, AppEngine-based app) is stored as a blob in Datastore.

Nope...

Posted Nov 21, 2011 21:08 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, there the reason that the webapp config is in a DB rather than text files is that this is easier and safer to read/write esp. when there may be multiple users changing settings at any given time. Sure you _could_ try and deal with multiple writers modifying config files while the app is continuously parsing and rereading the config to pick up changes but implementing all the custom parsing and locking is going to be a lot more difficult than writing a few simple select/insert/update/delete transactions.

Nope...

Posted Nov 22, 2011 0:45 UTC (Tue) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link] (2 responses)

Very true, even for a single user.
It remembers me of trying to synchronize history across multiple open gnome terminals in a way that they do not step on each others feet!

Nope...

Posted Nov 22, 2011 16:58 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Share history among *running* terminals or make sure that all history gets to the histfile? I have zsh set up to do the latter (the shell's history gets appended to the global history; it doesn't overwrite the histfile with old history plus its history (which bash does)). It's just "setopt appendhistory".

Nope...

Posted Dec 1, 2011 12:54 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>it doesn't overwrite the histfile with old history plus its history (which bash does)).

$ shopt -s histappend