Re: [Config4gnu-developer] important negatives to adress ASAP

[<p.c...@ar...>]

> > 4) There is more to configuring a running system than just editing
> > config
> > files. What about starting/stopping daemons? Creating and clean up of
> > user
> > accounts? querying the status of services?
 
> This is one of the reasons I've been looking at different approaches,
> including CORBA and WBEM. There are ways these things can be accomplished
> by
> continuing to pass XML back and forth, but it just starts to get clunky in
> my opinion.

My guess is that the init process itself will undergo some renewal
in the future as it is definitely too slow in startup and limited anyway.

On the other hand I don't think CFG needs or should expose this
functionality to frontends explicitly. It just needs to activate a change
commited by a frontend transparently according to the meta-config entity
affected.
For CFG this will probably just need to be a little command line to execute.

Managing user accounts is editing /etc/passwd and activation with useradd/del
with some additional meta-variables like "delete homedir of removed user".

Managing the startup configuration of services itself (sys V) would primarily
need a /etc/init.d directory parser for CFG.


> > 5) The real work is not parsing of writing files, it is doing all the
> > little jobs like finding
> > out where exactly each distro stores their network config for example and
> > in what format.

> [...]The idea is that
> once we made [file access]easy and had other parts of the framework in
> place,
> then we would go around and add support for many distributions and
> applications.

Most of this should not be necessary in the end, packages for particular
distributions ship with meta data tailored to their distro (file location).
In what format that distro stores its network config is irrelevant because
it is accassible through CFG in the same way on all distros. (CFG
network support meta-data comes with the distributions network package.
(Or with the CFG package itself in the meantime.))



All in all I think CFG has already been magnificently thought through and mostly needs some employment now to make its beauty more obvious.

Assuming a little polish for release and third party meta-data additions is done.