Absence of a built-in simple database model, I think. The unix way is to use a flat file, which turned out in the long term to be inadequate. Part of the underl

Absence of a built-in simple database model, I think. The unix way is to use a flat file, which turned out in the long term to be inadequate. Part of the underlying reason for systemd on Linux is that people want to configure their system with a robust database, not shell scripts or ad-hoc text file formats which must be edited by hand, or by custom database drivers (like Berkeley DB). Proplist might be another partial solution to this requirement on systems which lack an active data model. BeOS had a strong database-like file system which may address the same thing. See http://martinfowler.com/articles/languageWorkbench.html#ActiveDataModels http://martinfowler.com/articles/languageWorkbench.html#Acti...