8 ms·

Boiling frog, or when did we lose it with /etc?

59 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

protomyth 11y ago
OpenBSD has been reducing the files in the directory. I was in a bit of a panic when I noticed sysconfig.conf was missing. Now if you need to change the settings you add a local file.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Every time I read about BSDs I wanna try. The core team appear to make a coherent cohesive tractable system. Unlike the bazaar model used by Linux (intractable but working).
  - c22 11y ago
    Why not give it a shot? Running BSD is a low cost proposition.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      I don't know, the fear of hardware support, some random source of resistance that delay it. I'm sure one day I'll switch, just like when I told that old friend Windows he'd only be 3% of my computer time now. Right now I have a crippled nas4free running but I can't mess with the system too much. I'm already surprised to see subtle differences between linux base utilities. Makes you think. Also feels like LFS.
      - c22 11y ago
        Try it out in virtualbox? Even less investment.
        agumonkey 11y ago
        It doesn't feel like living in it.
        plorkyeran 11y ago
        Doesn't tell you if your hardware will work with it, and it's too easy to just switch to the host OS when you hit something you don't know how to do rather than having to learn how to do it in the OS you're trying out.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    OpenBSD works fine in a VM. Look through the FAQ http://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html http://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html and away you go. The only part of installation that is a bit confusing (to me at least) is the first time doing disc partitioning. The auto is fine, but you might want to read a bit. Install your favorite software from packages http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html and have fun. Its a simple, logical system http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man7/hier.7?query=hier http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man7/... Every 6 months is a new release. Do the upgrade and then upgrade your packages. Its really pretty easy. Do patches between releases which aren't that hard, but they are not binary. The instructions on the website are simple with very direct and good warnings.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    OpenBSD was amazing when it still fit my server needs. I was very impressed. I would go back in a heartbeat if I could. Any old and generic box will love it. It has ridiculously low resource demands and generic hardware will ensure you have no esoteric driver problems.
Someone1234 11y ago
Everyone always gives the Windows Registry guff. But while I think the Windows Registry has a lot of problems, it also is a step forward on the mess if incompatible configuration files found within /etc (and /usr/local/etc) on your average modern UNIX-like OS. And now you're seeing tooling, like Docker, which is specifically designed to isolate the mess around each mess-user (essentially creating a bundle of mess). The whole filesystem layout is pretty poor, with massive amounts of inconsistencies (/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin) between different software and even distributions. So you just wind up with everything scattered all over the place, and package managers exist essentially to corral the mess. Everyone loves to talk about how UNIX is simple, and how UNIX concepts date back to at least the 1970s, and while that is true in theory, in practice the inconsistent behaviour and lack of much evolution has ultimately meant that UNIX's simplicity doesn't scale very well as the systems become more complex with more moving pieces. But nobody is willing to touch or even criticise the mess that is modern UNIX because they know they will get massively criticised by the old guard and the die hards (see systemd, which is trying to evolve classic UNIX concepts and getting massively attacked, even death threats as a result). Windows' file system is also a mess. But at least Microsoft are trying something with Windows RT "Apps," at least they're trying to move forward and progress. The UNIX world is in cryogenic suspension, even Apple has only hidden a lot of the mess and not really fixed much of it.
- nsajko 11y ago
  You can't criticise "modern UNIX" in general based on the ugliness of the filesystem hierarchy of one system. Edit: or most systems, the point is that the ugliness is not intrinsic to unix-likes
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    That's fair. Which modern UNIX variant has a nice filesystem layout and has modernised etc?
    - pjc50 11y ago
      Define "modern" and "nice". (This sounds flippant, but is actually important as these are completely subjective. The answer may turn out to be OSX..)
cosarara97 11y ago
When did blogs start showing a 'loading' screen, then doing a weird scroll thing at load, and having stuff unfolding near the scrollbar?
- jakob223 11y ago
  Blogger's been doing this for a while.
  - marssaxman 11y ago
    How gross! I used to like Blogger.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  When they got bloated down by designers trying to reinvent HTML 1.1 in Javascript. This page won't show with Javascript disabled, and that's a shame. There's nothing on that page that can't exist as flat HTML. There's nothing on that page that requires Javascript, but the page won't function without it for some reason. Do we still downvote/flag comments that aren't directly related to the content of the linked material?
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    Have an up vote. I get down voted every time I complain about the javascriptification of the web.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Did the same as JustSomeNobody for same reason. We did a ton of stuff without Javascript in late 90's and even automated lots of it. Even did menus without it (see dynamicdrive.com). Now even basic blog entries need it to prevent a messed up experience. "Progress." (sighs) Least it's a lot faster & better on the sites that actually need it. :)
ars 11y ago
Having no files in /etc is considerably less discoverable. It can be handled with good documentation or example files in /usr/share/doc but it's still harder that way. Of course there are downsides that this article brings up. But is the problem simply the existence of a file in /etc ? Because that doesn't seem to be a problem to me, instead the problem is upgrades that are harder because they have to merge changes. Seems to me the solution is to use 3 way diffs like how source control system do it, and update configuration files automatically as much as possible.
- joosters 11y ago
  I love the discoverability of /etc files, and the ability to read & edit them with whatever tools you like. If the files only included changes to default settings, and the defaults are hidden away in program binaries, how are we to discover what settings even exist in the first place? Verbose /etc config files are human-friendly and that's a good thing. Managing updates and merging config changes is still do-able. The logic to do the merges might be more complicated, but I'd rather let the complicated stuff be handled by the upgrade tools and not forced upon the user.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
5bolts 11y ago
its not even just a windows / unix thing.. my software company can't even pick a method. registry keys .exe.config files .xml files .ini files .cfg files true false entries, bitwise operators... custom "hosts" file type configs all for one application... each developer that gets an enhancement uses whatever they want to to build/configure it.
andmarios 11y ago
Sorry, no. Even if it is the default configuration I want to know it, see it and be able to manipulate it whether it is my 1st or 100th time of configuring a particular software. What puzzles me most, is why one would spent so much time looking inside /etc. Editing files inside /etc? Sure, many times per day. Opening /etc inside a file manager? Never. Running ls inside /etc? Maybe once a month.
ekidd 11y ago
From the article: When was the last time you looked at /etc and thought - "I honestly know what every single file in here is". Or for example had a thought "Each file in here is configuration changes that I made". I first started administering Linux servers and workstations in 1998, and /etc/ was already full of scores of config files, including such horrors as X86Config and M4-generated sendmail.cf files. (And sendmail.cf itself dates from the 80s.) There were conf.d directories and mysterious networking configuration files, nearly all of which were supplied by the OS. In other words, this frog was thoroughly boiled 20 years ago. If the world you're looking for ever existed, it would have been back when VAXes still roamed the earth.
- nailer 11y ago
  Ditto. My name's likely in your Linux distro, but I also started in 98, and even then you would never expect a given package to work without default config files.
felixgallo 11y ago
The desktop linux dudes sure do pick weird topics to get excited about. First it was cold boot time, resulting in the hilarious neverending clown rodeo that is systemd. Then it was that they didn't understand IPC, so it was the gloriously undesigned protocol 'dbus' which has to get wedged into the kernel because the user space version is so bad that it's useless. Now it's that there's a number of config files in /etc? And so we should take that number down to zero, because reasons? Can't wait for them to discover that bytes are 8 bits, rather than a more pleasing 5 or 10.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  I have found myself thinking about the term "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" whenever some desktop Linux developer/pundit fire off a new blog/email these days.
- Shorel 11y ago
  Hey! I love my Ubuntu cold boot time of less than a second.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    And then spend a minute watching the unresponsive desktop because all the deferred daemons being started?
    - Shorel 11y ago
      Not really. I click on Skype and it's three seconds until all contacts appear, and those seconds can be blamed on the network. The only thing that loads slowly is Chrome with my 50 open tabs, and I don't think it's the fault of the OS. In the same hardware what you describe actually happens every time with Windows 7 (I can't upgrade the Windows version, corporate policy) and it's a really annoying process.
gtirloni 11y ago
Is there anything out there trying to describe a whole system in a consistent way? Probably not, but some minimal standard would go a long way. For me the fact that each software has a different syntax (some even use programming language for configuration purposes) is what makes life hard.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Another reader posted this Linux. It's filesystem is truly a 180. Plus backward compatible. http://www.gobolinux.org/?page=at_a_glance http://www.gobolinux.org/?page=at_a_glance
- fineIllregister 11y ago
  NixOS > In NixOS, the entire operating system — the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on — is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it’s purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this. > You configure a NixOS system by writing a specification of the functionality that you want on your machine in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix. https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html and GuixSD > The Guix System Distribution supports a consistent whole-system configuration mechanism. By that we mean that all aspects of the global system configuration—such as the available system services, timezone and locale settings, user accounts—are declared in a single place. Such a system configuration can be instantiated—i.e., effected. > One of the advantages of putting all the system configuration under the control of Guix is that it supports transactional system upgrades, and makes it possible to roll-back to a previous system instantiation, should something go wrong with the new one (see Features). Another one is that it makes it easy to replicate the exact same configuration across different machines, or at different points in time, without having to resort to additional administration tools layered on top of the system’s own tools. http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/System-Configuration.html http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/System-Con...

59 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

OpenBSD has been reducing the files in the directory. I was in a bit of a panic when I noticed sysconfig.conf was missing. Now if you need to change the settings you add a local file.

agumonkey 11y ago
Every time I read about BSDs I wanna try. The core team appear to make a coherent cohesive tractable system. Unlike the bazaar model used by Linux (intractable but working).
- c22 11y ago
  Why not give it a shot? Running BSD is a low cost proposition.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    I don't know, the fear of hardware support, some random source of resistance that delay it. I'm sure one day I'll switch, just like when I told that old friend Windows he'd only be 3% of my computer time now. Right now I have a crippled nas4free running but I can't mess with the system too much. I'm already surprised to see subtle differences between linux base utilities. Makes you think. Also feels like LFS.
    - c22 11y ago
      Try it out in virtualbox? Even less investment.
      - agumonkey 11y ago
        It doesn't feel like living in it.
      - plorkyeran 11y ago
        Doesn't tell you if your hardware will work with it, and it's too easy to just switch to the host OS when you hit something you don't know how to do rather than having to learn how to do it in the OS you're trying out.
- protomyth 11y ago
  OpenBSD works fine in a VM. Look through the FAQ http://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html http://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html and away you go. The only part of installation that is a bit confusing (to me at least) is the first time doing disc partitioning. The auto is fine, but you might want to read a bit. Install your favorite software from packages http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html and have fun. Its a simple, logical system http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man7/hier.7?query=hier http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man7/... Every 6 months is a new release. Do the upgrade and then upgrade your packages. Its really pretty easy. Do patches between releases which aren't that hard, but they are not binary. The instructions on the website are simple with very direct and good warnings.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  OpenBSD was amazing when it still fit my server needs. I was very impressed. I would go back in a heartbeat if I could. Any old and generic box will love it. It has ridiculously low resource demands and generic hardware will ensure you have no esoteric driver problems.

Someone1234 11y ago

Everyone always gives the Windows Registry guff. But while I think the Windows Registry has a lot of problems, it also is a step forward on the mess if incompatible configuration files found within /etc (and /usr/local/etc) on your average modern UNIX-like OS. And now you're seeing tooling, like Docker, which is specifically designed to isolate the mess around each mess-user (essentially creating a bundle of mess). The whole filesystem layout is pretty poor, with massive amounts of inconsistencies (/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin) between different software and even distributions. So you just wind up with everything scattered all over the place, and package managers exist essentially to corral the mess. Everyone loves to talk about how UNIX is simple, and how UNIX concepts date back to at least the 1970s, and while that is true in theory, in practice the inconsistent behaviour and lack of much evolution has ultimately meant that UNIX's simplicity doesn't scale very well as the systems become more complex with more moving pieces. But nobody is willing to touch or even criticise the mess that is modern UNIX because they know they will get massively criticised by the old guard and the die hards (see systemd, which is trying to evolve classic UNIX concepts and getting massively attacked, even death threats as a result). Windows' file system is also a mess. But at least Microsoft are trying something with Windows RT "Apps," at least they're trying to move forward and progress. The UNIX world is in cryogenic suspension, even Apple has only hidden a lot of the mess and not really fixed much of it.

nsajko 11y ago
You can't criticise "modern UNIX" in general based on the ugliness of the filesystem hierarchy of one system. Edit: or most systems, the point is that the ugliness is not intrinsic to unix-likes
- Someone1234 11y ago
  That's fair. Which modern UNIX variant has a nice filesystem layout and has modernised etc?
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Define "modern" and "nice". (This sounds flippant, but is actually important as these are completely subjective. The answer may turn out to be OSX..)

cosarara97 11y ago

When did blogs start showing a 'loading' screen, then doing a weird scroll thing at load, and having stuff unfolding near the scrollbar?

jakob223 11y ago
Blogger's been doing this for a while.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  How gross! I used to like Blogger.
stephengillie 11y ago
When they got bloated down by designers trying to reinvent HTML 1.1 in Javascript. This page won't show with Javascript disabled, and that's a shame. There's nothing on that page that can't exist as flat HTML. There's nothing on that page that requires Javascript, but the page won't function without it for some reason. Do we still downvote/flag comments that aren't directly related to the content of the linked material?
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Have an up vote. I get down voted every time I complain about the javascriptification of the web.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Did the same as JustSomeNobody for same reason. We did a ton of stuff without Javascript in late 90's and even automated lots of it. Even did menus without it (see dynamicdrive.com). Now even basic blog entries need it to prevent a messed up experience. "Progress." (sighs) Least it's a lot faster & better on the sites that actually need it. :)

ars 11y ago

Having no files in /etc is considerably less discoverable. It can be handled with good documentation or example files in /usr/share/doc but it's still harder that way. Of course there are downsides that this article brings up. But is the problem simply the existence of a file in /etc ? Because that doesn't seem to be a problem to me, instead the problem is upgrades that are harder because they have to merge changes. Seems to me the solution is to use 3 way diffs like how source control system do it, and update configuration files automatically as much as possible.

joosters 11y ago
I love the discoverability of /etc files, and the ability to read & edit them with whatever tools you like. If the files only included changes to default settings, and the defaults are hidden away in program binaries, how are we to discover what settings even exist in the first place? Verbose /etc config files are human-friendly and that's a good thing. Managing updates and merging config changes is still do-able. The logic to do the merges might be more complicated, but I'd rather let the complicated stuff be handled by the upgrade tools and not forced upon the user.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

5bolts 11y ago

its not even just a windows / unix thing.. my software company can't even pick a method. registry keys .exe.config files .xml files .ini files .cfg files true false entries, bitwise operators... custom "hosts" file type configs all for one application... each developer that gets an enhancement uses whatever they want to to build/configure it.

andmarios 11y ago

Sorry, no. Even if it is the default configuration I want to know it, see it and be able to manipulate it whether it is my 1st or 100th time of configuring a particular software. What puzzles me most, is why one would spent so much time looking inside /etc. Editing files inside /etc? Sure, many times per day. Opening /etc inside a file manager? Never. Running ls inside /etc? Maybe once a month.

ekidd 11y ago

From the article: When was the last time you looked at /etc and thought - "I honestly know what every single file in here is". Or for example had a thought "Each file in here is configuration changes that I made". I first started administering Linux servers and workstations in 1998, and /etc/ was already full of scores of config files, including such horrors as X86Config and M4-generated sendmail.cf files. (And sendmail.cf itself dates from the 80s.) There were conf.d directories and mysterious networking configuration files, nearly all of which were supplied by the OS. In other words, this frog was thoroughly boiled 20 years ago. If the world you're looking for ever existed, it would have been back when VAXes still roamed the earth.

nailer 11y ago
Ditto. My name's likely in your Linux distro, but I also started in 98, and even then you would never expect a given package to work without default config files.

felixgallo 11y ago

The desktop linux dudes sure do pick weird topics to get excited about. First it was cold boot time, resulting in the hilarious neverending clown rodeo that is systemd. Then it was that they didn't understand IPC, so it was the gloriously undesigned protocol 'dbus' which has to get wedged into the kernel because the user space version is so bad that it's useless. Now it's that there's a number of config files in /etc? And so we should take that number down to zero, because reasons? Can't wait for them to discover that bytes are 8 bits, rather than a more pleasing 5 or 10.

digi_owl 11y ago
I have found myself thinking about the term "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" whenever some desktop Linux developer/pundit fire off a new blog/email these days.
Shorel 11y ago
Hey! I love my Ubuntu cold boot time of less than a second.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  And then spend a minute watching the unresponsive desktop because all the deferred daemons being started?
  - Shorel 11y ago
    Not really. I click on Skype and it's three seconds until all contacts appear, and those seconds can be blamed on the network. The only thing that loads slowly is Chrome with my 50 open tabs, and I don't think it's the fault of the OS. In the same hardware what you describe actually happens every time with Windows 7 (I can't upgrade the Windows version, corporate policy) and it's a really annoying process.

gtirloni 11y ago

Is there anything out there trying to describe a whole system in a consistent way? Probably not, but some minimal standard would go a long way. For me the fact that each software has a different syntax (some even use programming language for configuration purposes) is what makes life hard.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Another reader posted this Linux. It's filesystem is truly a 180. Plus backward compatible. http://www.gobolinux.org/?page=at_a_glance http://www.gobolinux.org/?page=at_a_glance
fineIllregister 11y ago
NixOS > In NixOS, the entire operating system — the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on — is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it’s purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this. > You configure a NixOS system by writing a specification of the functionality that you want on your machine in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix. https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html and GuixSD > The Guix System Distribution supports a consistent whole-system configuration mechanism. By that we mean that all aspects of the global system configuration—such as the available system services, timezone and locale settings, user accounts—are declared in a single place. Such a system configuration can be instantiated—i.e., effected. > One of the advantages of putting all the system configuration under the control of Guix is that it supports transactional system upgrades, and makes it possible to roll-back to a previous system instantiation, should something go wrong with the new one (see Features). Another one is that it makes it easy to replicate the exact same configuration across different machines, or at different points in time, without having to resort to additional administration tools layered on top of the system’s own tools. http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/System-Configuration.html http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/System-Con...