Re: System administration with GNOME.

[Chris Jones <chris black-sun co uk>]

Hi

Mo McKinlay <mmckinlay@labs.interopen.org> wrote:
> 
> That's an interesting view. In concept, the registry is a good idea - I 

Is it?
It's rather a case of putting all your eggs in one basket. I would say the
Windows registry is a text book example of exactly why they are a bad idea.
Besides, it would be impossible to co-ordinate (unless Helix is going to
start it's own distro and patch *every* daemon to use a registry of some
kind ;)

Bringing things back to the system configuration tool, it occured to me that
rather than using Python, Perl or some other scripting languages, it might
make sense to write the thing in C and then the existing code for the config
file parsers from the various daemons can simply be borrowed. Why waste
months of effort writing parsers for all these config files when they
already exist?! Obviously for most daemons that would only apply to reading
the config file, but at least that's half the work done in a considerably
shorter time than would otherwise be possible.
The most annoying thing about configuration tools like Linuxconf (more so
than any gripes with the UI or code) is that they tend to go mental if you
edit the files without their knowledge (last time I used Linuxconf it
insisted on putting it's own copies of the config files on top of the one's
I'd hand edited!) and they can be tripped up with even the slightest change
in the config file format.
 
-- 
 _____ _         _       _____
| __  | |___ ___| |_ ___|   __|_ _ ___        Chris "Ng" Jones
| __ -| | .'|  _| '_|___|__   | | |   |  chris@black-sun.co.uk
|_____|_|__,|___|_,_|   |_____|___|_|_|    www.black-sun.co.uk
            S o f t w a r e