On Mar 18, 2008, at 4:40 PM, Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote: > --On Tuesday, March 18, 2008 06:27:38 PM -0500 Nicolas Williams > <Nicolas.Williams at sun.com > > wrote: > >> But one thing is clear: the architectural direction for Solaris is >> and >> long has been to move away from configuration files whose admin >> interface is $EDITOR. > > Sure, and I have no problem with that goal. The problem is that > while an administrator of a standalone machine knows what change he > wants to make, an administrator of a large number of machines knows > what he wants the configuration to look like. The problem arises > when you change the interface from one in which I can provide a file > that says what the configuration should be to one in which I must > provide a program that examines the current configuration and tries > to figure out how it differs from what it should be. Such things > are possible, but they are a lot of effort.
[snip] > I suppose I should be fair. I don't hate SMF. I hate its > configuration model, for the reasons described above. I have not yet made peace with SMF. I recognize that it may be solving a real problem, but I can't yet tell. I can say it reminds me very uncomfortably of SysV lp vice BSD lpr. For all the warts and limitations of the latter it was an awful lot easier to get set up and working. You could just look at the printcap file and see everything you needed to know. With SysV lp you not only can't look at the actual configuration directly, but the command you run to see the configuration bears no detectable relationship to the command you use to modify the configuration. While I can't say that either of those commands is as hard as a typical text editor, at least the editor is something that I already knew because I use it for other things. (-: Don't get me started on CUPS. ;-) In the case of SMF Sun seems to have taken some well-known ascii config files that are really easy to read, and can be maintained with any of a number of tools, and replaced them with an opaque database which can only be maintained with some Sun-unique commands whose syntax and semantics do not appear to have anything in common with anything else I deal with. If someone could tell me that Apple's Launchd (about which I would make exactly the same complaints) and SMF were the same technology and were accessed the same way I would be a lot happier. I find it really difficult to invest time in learning single-platform technologies. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The opinions expressed in this message are mine, not those of Caltech, JPL, NASA, or the US Government. Henry.B.Hotz at jpl.nasa.gov, or hbhotz at oxy.edu
