  Re: The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management
On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, Horst von Brand wrote:  Some (simple)
configurations can be described by a bunch of "Variable FOO gets
the value BAR", others just cannot (sanely, at least). There is
stuff like DNS, a web server for several domains, or the setup
of a DHCP server for multiple nets, where you just can't pretend
everything is one flat, uniform space. Configuration spaces have
structure, and the whole idea of a configuration file with a
non-trivial syntax is to be able to mirror said structure. The
spaces aren't shaped equal, so either you end up squashing
everything into some (unnatural) flat representation or you end
up with the sum total of all (possible) diferent shapes (which
is completely impossible for a mere human to handle). Sure, you
can decree that configuration files are written in XML, which is
expressive enough to create its own syntax on a file-by-file
basis, but even that doesn't help one bit with the mapping of
syntax to semantics