On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Horst von Brand wrote:
Shane Stixrud shane@geeklords.org wrote:
On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Bill Crawford wrote:
[...]
Ah. The "it must all be integrated" straw man. (sigh)
There is no straw man, real advantages and features become available when configuration data is unified.
If you mean "single format", I might agree (but that is /much/ harder than it looks, the needs range from a handful of variables to complex structured "programs" in specialized languages). If you also mean "single repository", you are way off the deep end (Hint: Single point of failure, no way to handle alternative configurations, no way to chroot the config, ...)
By unified I mean all configuration syntax is predictable, hierarchical and standardized.
I also mean multi-repository i.e. Elektra like filesys, dbm etc... My preferred "repository" would be an on-disk hierarchical directory/file structure (filesys) where each application/subsystem has a its own root directory and optional sub-directories.
Read the rest of this thread and you will see all of your concerns have already been addressed i.e. chroot, alternate configs.
Cheers, Shane