[arch-general] Re: My end-user $0.02 on /etc/rc.conf splitting.

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

The 23/07/12, Heiko Baums wrote:
> Am Mon, 23 Jul 2012 09:36:05 +0200
> schrieb Nicolas Sebrecht <nsebrecht at piing.fr>:

> > Who is manually editing each configuration one after the other need
> > lessons on administration tasks.
> 
> I don't think so. Who manually edits config files just don't trust all
> those merging tools, because he has made bad experience with those
> tools or has other reasons and wants to keep full control over his
> config files. And believe me, checking if the merging tools made what
> they are expected to do is much more time consuming than manually
> editing those files.

I think we are not talking about the same thing. I'm talking about
merging tools. I don't know of any merging tool on earth doing the choice
of patching whithout asking for conflict resolution from the user.

> I don't need to edit those files so many times. And if I have only one
> short file like /etc/rc.conf I have all my settings at a glance and
> only need to type "nano /etc/rc.conf" only once instead of several
> times "nano /etc/vconsole.conf", "nano /etc/hostname.conf" or whatever.
> This is a lot more time consuming.

No, no. Even without merging tool, 3 or 5 files instead of one is not
time consuming.

What is time consuming is a system strongly damaged because of human
mistake in a configuration file, more likely to happen with a
one-central-configuration-file-for-non-related-things-around.

> One single /etc/rc.conf is a bit more KISS.

One single rc.conf is not KISS. :-)
I think this principle is mainly misunderstood.

KISS principle makes sense for integration from upstream. It's definetly
NOT about "how simple it looks like".

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht