Smart config file parsing

[Grant McWilliams]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 10:49 PM, Michael Jennings <mej at kainx.org> wrote:

> 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
>
> -
>
To have version control handled by a GPG signed database managed package
installed by a core piece of software
instead of relying on a third party version control system to write files to
the hard drive? Yes I do. But since you think that
it's not maybe you should give the largest Linux Server company a call and
let them
know about your much simpler method of setting a variable. I'm sure you'll
have them scrambling to implement it as default right away.
The point is we don't always need a sophisticated complex way of doing a
job. Einstein said to "Make everything as simple as possible,
but not simpler." That Albert was a smart guy. Installing one package does
actually work 99.99% of
the time. It seems a bit hackish but requires very few dependencies that
wouldn't already exist anyway (rpm).

Besides none of this matters anyway - that's the way it's done on the Redhat
based distros so either we can get our panties in a twist
or work with it.

Just out of curiosity how does Suse and Ubuntu deal with setting the OS
version? I believe Ubuntu's is set in the sources.list file which I'd guess
exists in a package managed by APT. I may be wrong though. Ubuntu can update
the entire distro beyond a point release though and I wouldn't
mind knowing how that's managed. I don't know anything about Suse's current
(as in this week) package system
or how it sets the OS version.

Grant
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