Changing the way configuration is stored (Was Re: TurnKey Linux's take on Ubuntu appliance development: KISS)

Carlos Ribeiro carribeiro at gmail.com
Mon Dec 14 16:13:54 GMT 2009


Liraz,

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 13:36, Liraz Siri <liraz at turnkeylinux.org> wrote:

> Great ideas but as you mention a bit out of the scope of what we have
> the resources to accomplish at the moment.
>
> So I'm thinking the community's direction should be to improve packaging
> infrastructure generically with the help of upstream and new
> experimental innovations to configuration management and in a few years
> when most of the major gotchas have been addressed re-evaluate and
> refine the technical direction for appliance development to include
> these advances. As a developer I'd love to see that happen but at the
> same time I realize most users don't really care about what happens
> under the hood. They just want stuff to work. Right now. TurnKey is all
> about bridging the gap between the value the best open source software
> can deliver and the value end-users are getting.
>

First of all, thanks for your thorough reply! So in essence we agree on a
lot of stuff - it's just that the timing isn't good. Resources are limited;
there are technical problems to solve; and finally, it's not clear what the
*best* solution is, as people are still experimenting with it (and
improving). That pretty much sums it up.

One point that comes as entirely unrelated but may end up being a big
roadblock is the question of modular configurations. (in fact I changed the
subject to reflect this). Recently there was some discussion regarding ext4
and the unfortunate side effects that some of its performance improvements
had - specially on small config files:

Ext4 Data Loss
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781

Comment from Theodore Ts'o
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/comments/45
(but there are several others later on the thread)

At one point Theodore Ts'o advocates that programs store configuration using
a database (for example Sqlite) specifically tuned for it. So we *may* end
up with some kind of system registry (pretty much like Windows) sooner or
later. It will change the way config is stored, and as a consequence, change
the way we build appliances. A central database may be much worse to work
with, or much better, than modular config files - it all depends on the
implementation & API that gets used. I prefer to not to pick a winner here,
because relative merits are (as said) relative :-)

-- 
Carlos Ribeiro
Consultoria em Projetos
twitter: http://twitter.com/carribeiro
blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
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