[OT] Debian mailinglists [was: RE: Debian or Ubuntu?]

[Derek Broughton]

Avi Greenbury wrote:

> On Mon, 19 May 2008 21:46:53 -0300
> Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> 
>> Mike Bird wrote:
>> 
>> > Configs MUST always be readily understandable and modifiable by
>> > both humans-with-texteditors and programs.  Simple text config
>> > files and maybe XML are acceptable; Windoze registry is not.
>> > 
>> > Derek's point is that it SHOULD also be possible to edit configs
>> > via a question/answer system with syntactic and consistency checks.
>> 
>> No, actually it isn't.  I'd be happier if it wasn't even possible to
>> configure most servers with a text editor.
> 
> Would that include an X11 server?

Especially.  That's apparently Ubuntu and Xorg's aim (at least to prevent
the necessity of editing - it's *nix, so you can't actually _prevent_
someone editing the files).  Haven't you noticed that we get a smaller
percentage of emails on these lists these days about X configuration than
we used to?  That's because people are needing to do much less hand editing
(back in the Corel Linux days, when I started, I spent, literally, weeks
getting X configured properly - I haven't touched my xorg.conf file in
_years_, now - and never for this machine).
> 
> Or a web server to which one has no physical access?

Again, yes.  Apache is less of a problem than some servers, in that I can
hand edit the configs and test them before restarting Apache, but I'd be a
lot happier with a tool that didn't let me write invalid config files in
the first place.
-- 
derek