Alan Coopersmith writes: > Yann POUPET wrote: > > Thus maybe writing config files with an XML format would help ? > > > > Furthermore, as I said before, there may be a lot of config files. > > Why not have ALL configuration into a single file ? That could be a hash, a > berkeleydb file (I think E17 uses such files for conf), or whatever. (isn't > it the way MS Win does with is registry ?) > > For files needed by everyone, this file would be /config (or /etc/config), > for personnal config that could be ~/config. Thus only two locations for all > configs. > > Now that's starting to sound a lot like the SMF properties database.
SMF was designed to help unify system/service configuration. It isn't used to its full capabilities there yet, but expect to see more Solaris system and service configuration moving into the SMF repository (also known as SCF). The benefit of a single configuration source are significant -- not just limited to unifying the parser code, but also unifying management practices, providing extended capabilities such as rollback of configuration to known-good versions, comparison of historical values, use of a network-repository (e.g. LDAP) backend, etc. Much of the power of this paradigm isn't yet evident in our tools -- the existing SMF tools only scratch the surface in terms of offering enhanced usability and management, but we're working on it. We even have ideas on how to solve the compatibility-with-known-file-formats problem. Expect to see announcements of projects in both the SMF community, as well as the Visual Panels project, which will offer better visualization of configuration in SMF. As a glimpse into some of the design choices which drove our repository implementation, you can take a look at: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/lianep?entry=smf_repository_design_choices Come join us in the SMF community if you're interested in participating in further system/service-configuration discussions. liane -- Liane Praza, Solaris Kernel Development [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://blogs.sun.com/lianep _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
