In article <rmi7dq9lg6k....@s1.lexort.com>, Greg Troxel <g...@lexort.com> wrote: >-=-=-=-=-=- > > >James Browning <jamesbrowning...@gmail.com> writes: > >> maintainers at their own discretion. Some of you brought up the concern of >> over-automating the system at the potential risk of the configuration system >> becoming too opaque and administrators allowing packages to configure inetd >> without their knowledge of what is happening. However, we believe that with > >As I read it, that was mostly mouse@. My take was that most of the >concerns were about not making it super complicated and maintaining >backwards compat.
Yes, if you don't like the new syntax don't use it; if you don't like separate configuration files, don't create them. At the same time don't deny others from choosing to use it, have an easier to understand syntax[1], a safer change process, and an easier way for 3rd party packages to control services. One can make arguments on both sides, and what one ends up choosing depends on their taste, on what they know, and the priorities of their goals. Trying to convince others of ones beliefs becomes religion... Space separated fields with positional meaning, extended by punctuation is the current state of the art in configuration files it seems :-( You should actually read the inetd parser source really understand the mess. This is FreeBSD's syntax: service-name socket-type protocol {wait|nowait}[/max-child[/max-connections-per-ip-per-minute\ [/max-child-per-ip]]] user[:group][/login-class] server-program server-program-arguments This is ours: [listen-addr:]service-spec socket-type[:accept-filter[,arg]] protocol[,sndbuf=size][,rcvbuf=size] wait/nowait[:max] user[:group] server-program server program arguments Ah, and the [,arg] is not documented in the man page, you need to read the source. Draw your own conclusions. christos