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.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 9:32 am and is filed under content, sling, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to Why I love unixish configs

  1. Michael Marth says:
    June 30, 2008 at 10:57 am

    and scriptable e.g. by sys admins

  2. Jukka Zitting says:
    June 30, 2008 at 5:33 pm

    Let’s put all the configs inside the repository!

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