Smart config file parsing

[Michael Jennings]

On Friday, 13 June 2008, at 10:23:52 (-0700),
Grant McWilliams wrote:

> Even though the fedora-release/redhat-release/centos-release way may
> not be perfect it works fairly well. I have had this system get
> mucked though and a quick rpm -e centos-release, yum install
> centos-release solved it.

Stop and think about that for a minute.  Do you honestly think that is
the most reasonable, most appropriate solution to the problem at hand?
How is that more reasonable or more clear than editing a config file?
It really boils down to the fact that people have accepted that course
of action as "the way it is."

If your concern is that you're managing numerous systems, it's
significantly more reasonable to propogate config changes via
distribution of a single config file update (via pdsh/pdcp, cfengine,
or some revision control system) than to require all hosts to
uninstall/reinstall a particular package.

Michael

-- 
Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX)  http://www.kainx.org/  <mej at kainx.org>
Linux Server/Cluster Admin, LBL.gov       Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org)
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