Re: Caldera installation - something Debian should learn
On Thu, 22 Apr 1999, Jonathan P Tomer wrote:
> > I have read it. Keeping data in a text file that needs to be parsed
> > is an antiquated notion that needs to be eliminated. The information
> > contructs are correct, however.
>
> no no no! keeping data in a text file may be an old notion, but is not
> antiquated and *definitely* does not need to be eliminated. quite the
> contrary, in fact. text files for configuration information are Very Good
> Things (tm) because *text files can be edited however one wants*. forcing
In fact I believe that's their most glaring weakness. Enevitably popular
software has more and more parsers that read and write it's config files.
Note that they are DIFFERENT parsers(not equivalent ones). For any
dataset there should only be one way to access the data(one API for
example). This ensures that work is not duplicated. THIS is a good thing.
> the sysadmin to depend on a possibly buggy, definitely obscure admintool is
I have never mentioned an obsure admintool. If there was only one API
it certianly would not be buggy(libc for example is pretty solid).
> always a bad thing. parsing a text file, otoh, is comparatively easy to do,
Counter example: sendmail.cf
If parsing this is easy to do please write one in the next few hours
and post it. :>
> especially since it has been done already numerous times for just about any
> kind of structure.
You see that's the problem. It would not have to be done numerous times
if there was one common API. Who many ppl on this list have wrote a
perl script to edit httpd.conf somehow. Wasted effort.
> binary databases, by contrast, have only one virtue: they are slightly
> faster to look at. this does not even begin to compare with the advantage of
Slightly faster? No way. I store a checksum on a n MB file. You have
to parse the whole thing to see if it's changed. If fact there is no
situation where a text file is better in speed or space than a db.
What about differential backups?
> being able to edit the file. you can have some speed savings by building an
Who said you cannot dump the database to a text file?
> index of the database to be used by the administration tool, but it's not
> really worth the effort imho.
Yes that would be silly.
+---------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| R Garth Wood | Making waves... |
| Stormix Technologies Inc. | |
| rgwood@stormix.com | |
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