On Sun, 10.07.11 11:49, Chris Adams (cmadams@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> said: > > In this case there are sound > > technical arguments against configuration by command line argument or > > environment variable > > I haven't seen any, just statements that they are somehow "bad" and the > new way is "better". Here are a number of reasons: - You cannot really sensibly add comments to command lines - Reading and writing shell scripts is much harder for UIs than configuration files - Shell scripts are very verbose and hard to read, and you need to understand shell to do so, hence they are not user friendly, except for seasoned Unix admins - Shell scripts are slow - You cannot just scp config files between hosts because you don't have any - Configuration parsing errors are not helpful, not helpful at all, and the traditionally don't end up in syslog - Configuration options like "-f" or "-i" are not easily understandable and especially not self-explanatory - It's trivial to hide security holes in config parsing shell scripts - IFS, error handling is difficult, and so on And that's just the most obvious reasons why env vars, and cmdline args and faked shell-based config files are not particularly nice. I came up with this in 1min thinking. I am pretty sure I can come up with about 100 more if you ask me nicely. Anyway, I figure this is a religious thing, and you cannot argue with religion, so I'll shut up. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
