On Aug 24, 2005, at 6:10 PM, Dain Sundstrom wrote:
Could I add things rather than override?
No. You can do that in the console, but this file just lets you
override certain attributes for GBeans that are already in the
server.
You'll notice in the sample there aren't full GBean definitions,
only what
amounts to attribute=value entries.
Would anything stop you from doing that though?
I would. The idea here is to allow a few attributes to be customized
locally even on a server with immutable configurations. editing your
configuration contents should use a different system. Most
attributes and all references will not be editable in this config db.
I believe that this strategy is a bad idea. What is going to happen
is every time we release the software, someone is going to want to
tweak a setting that we either forgot to make manageable, or we
wrongly believed shouldn't be managed. Why not make all attributes*
manageable?
I think perhaps ones point of view on this argument has something to do
with whether one thinks small versioned binary configurations should be
the basic unit of distributing and building a server. If you think
that versioned binary configurations basically won't work, then there
is no reason to ever inhibit any editing of any configurations, ever,
since each server has no discernable relationship to any other server.
If you think versioned binary configurations are the one true path,
then you need some way to make sure that the allowed modifications to a
versioned binary configuration are rather small and don't affect its'
essential character: otherwise the version stops meaning anything.
Personally I would like to give versioned binary configurations a good
chance to see if we can make them work: I don't think we have tried
them yet, and if they can be made to work I think they will be a really
cool feature. I would prefer to see "arbitrary edits" take place using
something like the console or a special tool, and only on unversioned
mutable configurations.
thanks
david jencks
-dain
* Of course a user could not set a binary attribute but you get the
idea.
