Why I love unixish configs

I wrote this today while discussing configuration mechanisms with my colleagues.

I love the unixish way of configurating things because the configs are:

Discoverable
With find, xargs and grep I can (very often) find out where something
is configured in my unixish system, with minimal initial knowledge.
Commentable
It is easy to add comments to configuration items in a text-based
config, and comments are not mangled when that config is later
modified from a GUI, if that’s available.

Cloneable
Copying the right config files from one system to another allows
configs to be cloned.

Traceable
By putting my configs under subversion control, I know what happened to them.
Documentable
Processing my configs with simple tools allows me to create reports or
dashboards easily.

The opposite of this is the M$ hell of opaque configurations managed by (sometimes even more opaque) GUIs, and unfortunately Sling leans more towards that opposite at the moment. We’ll have to fix this.

2 Responses to Why I love unixish configs

  1. and scriptable e.g. by sys admins

  2. Let’s put all the configs inside the repository!

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