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From: "Brent Saner" <brent.saner@gmail.com>
>
> config files as opposed to what?
> i like the fact that i can back up an entire system-wide
> configuration by just copying a bunch of plaintext files. no
> proprietary binaries to worry about, nothing possibly getting
> "broken" and leaving your system unconfigurable...
Me too, me too. (Sorry, had an AOL moment... :)
Cast my vote for config files. I also come from the DOS/Windows world.
I could live with .ini files and they might even has a slight edge of
Linux config files in that they were sort-of standardized. But I hate
the registry with a passion. Make me think of the old Dilbert in which
he's instructed to make the user reboot if they make a mistake. As
Brent noted, screw up your registry and you can easily trash your
machine totally. Screw up a config file and *worst* case, Google for
the stock one or just reinstall the package and go from there. NBD.
Over the weekend I totally rebuilt a machine, and I was able to:
1) Do a clean install of a somewhat newer version of the OS
2) Check out the machine's previous /etc/ from Subversion, into /tmp/
3) Copy the .svn stuff into the brand new, stock, /etc/
4) svn st to see what was different between the brand new, stock, /etc/
and the /etc/ I'd previously had from the older version of the OS and
that I'd also customized.
That was all *amazingly* useful. Try that with any other config system
you can come up with.
Though having said that, I love the M0n0wall setup where the *entire*
system config (yes, *everything*) is a single XML file. Talk about easy
backup, change control and restore! (Yes, XML can be yucky, and no,
doing what I did above would not be trivial. It's still cool.)
Later,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP |:::======| jp{at}jpsdomain{dot}org
My Account, My Opinions |=========| http://www.jpsdomain.org/
----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
Microsoft has single-handedly nullified Moore's Law.
Innate design flaws of Windows make a personal firewall, anti-virus
and anti-malware software mandatory. The resulting software arms race
has effectively flattened Moore's Law on hardware running Windows.
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