[geeks] I love it when software gets more efficient

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 @ 11:33 -0700, William Kirkland said:

> Since the unix world uses flat files to hold the configuration files,  
> you should be able to distribute a script to each node, which would  
> adjust the configuration file of all users. You could even provide it  
> as a wrapper to your browser executable.

The problem here is that a lot of applications modify their
configuration files constantly.

It would be difficult to write distribute and merge code for so many
different applications.

This kind of thing really needs a standard.

Of course, I think that will lead to bloat and hard-to-edit
configuration files, performance and reliability issues, just like you
have with Windows.

KDE and Gnome are already pretty gross in the configuration file
department:

% whatfiles ~/.kde 
/home/shannon/.kde                 5640 files,      395 dirs,   192068 K
                       [local]        0 files,        0 dirs,        0 K
                       [total]     5643 files,      399 dirs,   192080 K

About 1000 of those files are cached image data, but still... that's one
hell of a lot of metadata to try and manage globally.

Of course, Gnome and KDE both pale in comparison to the massive Windows
registry, but it seems they are both well on their way.

It just seems like there has to be a better way.

> If designed and written correctly, unix users need only tweak their  
> environment, because their system admin has provided a good  
> configuration for their network-wide system.

Applications at the very least need to do an automatic read and merge,
starting with system configuration, and then merging in user
configuration.

A step further would be hints in system config files that let the admin
control which settings an application let a user modify.

> Prior to cross platform compatibility of NIS, referred to as yellow  
> pages (or yp) at the time, My users had the following features (some  
> on SunOS -- a bsd derivative at the time, others on SGI, Apollo,  
> Soulborne -- sun clone ... and a couple other vender's implementation  
> of unix):

[ snip ]

Nice, but that was a far simpler world than we have today.

I hate managing Windows registry data, or KDE and Gnome hidden metadata.

All three are messy, buggy, and complicated.

I'm gradually learning what I can mess with and what I can't, like
cleaning out old cached data without hurting anything.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The grieving lords take ship.  With these
our very souls pass overseas." -- Exile]