And here's something I'd like to see in the future: A persistent OS-provided facility for explaining the origin of configuration decisions. Linux has most conf

And here's something I'd like to see in the future: A persistent OS-provided facility for explaining the origin of configuration decisions. Linux has most configuration in text files, which is already better than binary files, but sometimes you have to do a lot of digging around in documentation to determine what statements of what files determine what configuration options. In many ways, the links between configuration files are opaque as if they were dynamic (try determining semantic links between disparate config files using standard unix tools), however it's clear that most configuration is in fact mostly static and so it would be great to be able to access this data (like dependencies) easily to aid with automatic dependency management and debugging. It would be great if in most cases, when the actual configuration differs from what you expect, you could ask the system why and it would tell you all the specific statements of config files that affected the configuration of the particular thing you're asking about (at various levels of granularity and abstraction). You could then easily see what you need to change to have the configuration you want.