On Sun, 2011-07-10 at 21:59 +0200, drago01 wrote: > On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Jon Masters <jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Sat, 2011-07-09 at 23:32 -0400, Steve Dickson wrote: > >> > >> On 07/08/2011 10:57 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote: > > > >> > Or in other words: configuration via command line arguments or > >> > environment variables sucks. > > > > I disagree. It doesn't suck. It's the way UNIX and Linux have done this > > for dozens of years, and it's the way countless sysadmins know and love. > > "Sucks" might be true from the point of view of "hey look at this great > > thing I just designed", but it's very much not true from the point of > > view of the sysadmin working on the weekend who's just thinking "gee, > > what the heck is going on, why won't this just work how it has done for > > the past twenty years?". In other words "suck" depends on viewpoint. > > Well really "it is perfect because it has been like that for $num > years, how dare you change it" is a very weak argument. Did I say it was perfect? No. Therein lies a confusion. There are many things that, were they designed now, would be done differently (and I'm sure if you tracked down the original inventors of many things they would have horror stories about how assumptions outlived designs). But once you have several decades of something deployed in the field, you can't just come overnight (where that is relative - compared to several decades, 6 months or even 2 years is overnight) and say "what we have is better, deal" because that's damned expensive from a successful product point of view. If we want people to use Fedora, and other Linux distributions in general, they can't have to throw out their books every couple of years and re-learn the very basics. Conversely, you can change this stuff, but you have to expect it to take *many years* to get there. > It has no > meaning at all from a technical pov. It is just "I am to lazy to learn > something new" ... but one should really expect sysadmins to be able > to keep up with changes like this. This point goes to the heart of why Windows is still so popular and successful in the marketplace. It's unfortunate, but the real world doesn't move as quickly as we would like it to do so. If it were just about technical arguments, everyone, everywhere would have been running Linux for the past decade or more, and everyone would jump at the awesomeness (technically) of some of these things. But the reality is that people are slow to change, organizations are slow to adapt, and people told "hey, what you've been doing for several decades is wrong" don't react well. That's what leads to rocking chairs on front porches. It's not that they're against you, it's that they're faced with having to use something that's fundamentally changed on them "overnight". You don't have to take my advice or opinion, it's just that. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
