Desktop, Debian, RH, and Calvanism (was Re: [svlug] HW system for Linux?)

[David N. Welton]

"Karsten M. Self" <kmself at ix.netcom.com> writes:

> Mac OS X is proving nicely that Unix is a perfectly suitable
> foundation for end-user desktops.  I don't think the stretch to
> GNU/Linux is particularly far.  I think the biggest problem is that
> there are two camps: one who sees the desktop as a platform from
> which fundamental user choices have been removed, another which
> finds the most valuable single feature of GNU/Linux to be choice.
> That's the war we've been waging for the past couple of years.  I'm
> still not quite sure how it washes out.

One of the central problems remains the fact that every subsystem on
unix (apache, bind, postfix, whatever) uses its own configuration file
format, making it very difficult to modify them both programmatically
and by hand.  The solution would be some kind of unified config file
format using something along the lines of Scheme or XML, so that it
would be possible to write plugins to configure everything from a
central point, without giving up the ability to edit the file with
one's favorite editor.

Unfortunately, this isn't going to happen any time soon.

-- 
David N. Welton
   Consulting: http://www.dedasys.com/
     Personal: http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/
Free Software: http://www.dedasys.com/freesoftware/
   Apache Tcl: http://tcl.apache.org/