[mythtv-users] On the verge of giving up

Mike Perkins mikep at randomtraveller.org.uk
Wed Sep 26 13:19:21 UTC 2007


Brett Kosinski wrote:
> 
> Again, apparently you didn't read what I wrote.
> 
> Personally, I think you're still mistaking the concept of a "centralized 
> configuration repository" with the Windows registry.  The latter is an 
> exceedingly poor an implementation of the former.  The former, however, 
> is not a fundamentally bad idea, if done right.  Which was my point at 
> the outset.
> 
You may be right. I might have confused your reply with the previous poster. 
However, I still don't see why /etc *by itself* is not good enough. Why 
introduce another level of complexity to something that works?

ISTR that Red Hat may have tried something like this in a very old version, 
whereby you could get at config files in the GUI through a common interface. Or 
perhaps it was Mandrake, or Debian, or SuSe. Tried quite a few when I was 
evaluating linux back in the day. Anyway, it's been tried before, and it caused 
more problems than it solved, because you have to have some kind of schema file 
which would have to declare every variable in every config file and every 
possible value (or provide a mechanism to reveal them) which instantly poses a 
synchronisation problem, since some software gets updated at different times to 
others. Someone has to maintain the whole mess, in other words. You notice that 
there's nothing like that in most current distributions? That's why, too complex.

Alternatively, it's just a transparent access to the underlying files. If you 
are going to do that, well, a shell and vi/emacs/other works just as easily.

Mike Perkins


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