Liraz, <div class="gmail_quote"> On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 13:36, Liraz Siri <<a href="mailto:liraz@turnkeylinux.org">liraz@turnkeylinux.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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. </blockquote><div> 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 <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781">https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781</a> Comment from Theodore Ts'o <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/comments/45">https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/comments/45</a> (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.鼦 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 :-) </div></div>-- Carlos Ribeiro Consultoria em Projetos twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/carribeiro">http://twitter.com/carribeiro</a> blog: <a href="http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com">http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com</a> mail: <a href="mailto:carribeiro@gmail.com">carribeiro@gmail.com</a>