Pointless rant: Red Hat Enterprise Server sucks!

[Darrin Chandler]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 06:51:40PM -0700, Mike Garfias wrote:
> RH puts many things in /etc/sysconfig that belong in either the top  
> level /etc dir or their own dir under /etc (ex: /etc/apache/)
> granted some are in the right place, but at best its an inconsistent  
> mess
> 
> also another bitch:
> wtf is /etc/sysconfig/networking and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts?
> why not one dir
> 
> its very non-intuitive.  With my experience I shouldn't have to hunt  
> for things for a few minutes, it should be obvious.  Solaris never  
> confused me like this, nor has any of the BSDs (tho the BSD init  
> process bugs the shit out of me).

Ok, I've *almost* entered this discussion about 5 times. The BSD mention
finally drew me out. ;-)

SysV init annoys some, and BSD init makes others crazy. I'm not going to
argue one vs. the other. It's just a fact of life. This split happened a
long time ago, and at least there's been a while to get used to it.

> I should also point out that 99.999% of the time I'm doing server  
> stuff.  And a lot of servers at that which means I use lots of  
> scripts and configuration management.

This is the real issue. For the VAST majority of home desktop users none
of this matters at all as long as the GUI config works. So if whoever at
the distro decides to do it a certain way and the GUI works with that,
then it's all fine. For those of us who deal with servers in quantity,
in racks, or in colo it's a very different picture. I don't give a
tinker's darn about GUI config panels. Hey, some of my boxes have
neither a video card not a place to put one! I'm not crazy about
commandline config tools, either. There's really not much need for them,
as long as you can keep configs in a repository, and do a little
scripting, etc., etc. If you can't, then you probably should outsource
your server admin to someone who can. So, it's nice to have configs in
some sensible format, and in some well known place. Why all these
distros felt the need to reinvent the wheel on this is beyond me. It
just makes life more difficult for people doing admin in a heterogenous
environment. It's like the weird djb directories all over again: it
doesn't matter if you're right if you violate longstanding conventions
and confuse everyone.

So there! ;-)

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD User Group  |  MetaBUG
dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://phxbug.org/      |  http://metabug.org/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |  Daemons in the Desert   |  Global BUG Federation