Date: Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:24:47 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Daniel Blankensteiner <db@traceroute.dk> Cc: freebsd-config@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD daemon configurations redesign Message-ID: <3CF876BF.28882CC0@mindspring.com> References: <F67gL6wxvw0IDT8zAJ90000d078@hotmail.com> <00c601c2082d$bc531ff0$6800a8c0@rafter> <3CF6B300.145E0CD9@mindspring.com> <011201c20832$34404750$6800a8c0@rafter> <3CF6CC39.BFC0A232@mindspring.com> <011001c20885$6dc3db60$6800a8c0@rafter> <3CF7E342.C351A12E@mindspring.com> <01bf01c208ec$b11a7380$6800a8c0@rafter> <3CF7FE67.868D4EF9@mindspring.com> <024201c208fb$0df8ae10$6800a8c0@rafter>
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Daniel Blankensteiner wrote: > > This was a lesson that some of our UI people never learned, and so > > they tried to change some basic underlying paradigms. Yes, it's > > possible to do what they wanted (though, probably not wise, if you > > get right down to it), but the cost would be to not be able to use > > the exisiting code out there for leverage: the job would have to be > > done "from scratch"... and there are litterally hundreds of thousands > > of man years of effort in software like DNS and sendmail, etc., that > > it would be a shame to have to duplicate. > > UI? "User Interface". > > I think you are much better off trying to build something like > > this (if you are smart, it will probably be based on LDAP), than > > you are in trying to change every piece of software out there to > > fit a paradigm that is specific to FreeBSD, and will lose you the > > third party maintenance that makes the current model valuable: > > it offloads maintenance onto third parties. > > LDAP? "Light-weight Directory Access Protocol". Basically, a hierarchical, rather than relational, database. The /etc/rc.conf, if you take "_" as a hierarchy delimiter, is already organized this way. > Ok, I did not know it all had to be rewritten from scratch. I thought > you just had to rewrite where the daemons store it's confil files. Each daemon has different configuration file code. You would have to replace it, and then, forever after, maintain it. > Making an interface to all these config files (like you said), is maybe > a better idea. Not what I said. I said that you should build a central data store for configuration data, and then derive the real configuration files, in whatever format is expected by the daemon, from the data in the central configuration store. > I would like to design this, but I don't think my code will be good > enogh for FreeBSD? There are a couple of programs that have dealt with this. One is the result of a thread called "Junior Annoying Hacker Task". See the message archives for -current from around the start of February. This really isn't an -arch discussion any more at this point; followups to the -config mailing list. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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