Shane Stixrud wrote:
I find it hard to believe no one else sees the current complexity of system/application configuration as undesirable?
Just my $0.02, since this is a question which I often hear from Unix newcomers, especially from Windows ... the current complexity is more apparent than real, it still undesiderable, but not to the point that just any apparent solution to said complexity would be adopted willy-nilly. The problem is not that the current situation is optimal, but that all proposed alternatives are subpar. At least as far as I can tell from my personal experience thus far, YMMV.
Is this problem too big to be addressed? Is there too much historical precedence involved? Or is there a solid technical reason for not having a standardized configuration file format?
There isn't, because the problem is not with the technical approach IMHO but in the users, developers and administrators using the system, so the current approach is best *social* compromise for an enviroment where none of the involved parties is able to dictate policy. Developers don't want to devote resources to configuration file handling, because they force the use of configuration to paper over deficiencies in their code in the first place; administrators don't want to risk a system which they cannot control and fix; users don't want to learn configuration files at all. So users change as little as necessary in textual files which the administrators trust they can fix over a 9600 baud cellphone ssh session in a format the developer never bothered to design in the first place. Thank you for your consideration, Davide Bolcioni -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
