discussioning how software gets obsolete in general [was Re: Does anyone use tcp wrappers (hosts.allow/hosts.deny) anymore?]

[Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 05:18:42PM -0400, m.roth@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> On the other hand, what justifiable reason was there for the massively
> increased complexity of grub2? 

Probably none, but legacy grub didn't have support for booting on UEFI
platforms, and no one wanted to add that support, let alone maintain it.

In recent Fedora, I added rudimentary support for extlinux as a bootloader
when you want to avoid the grub2 complexity. (This is a great example,
though, of something that may not trickle down from Fedora, unless someone
wants to step up to make the feature more robust.)

> And why do all configuration files suddenly
> *desperately* need to be xml?

If only the grub2 config files were xml! Instead, they're shell scripts
which generate shell scripts which generate the actual configuration. 
(Sadly, I'm not making that up. I think those might even source other shells
scripts.)

XML configruation happens when GUI developers write config files, mostly.
But fortunately it is not a universal disease -- systemd, for example, for
all its controvery, uses lovely sysadmin-friendly key=value config files.



-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx          <http://mattdm.org/>
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