Upgrading to 7.0 - stupid requirements

[Freddie Cash]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 9:20 PM, Garrett Wollman
<wollman at hergotha.csail.mit.edu> wrote:
> In article <b269bc570803222059o7b52c8d8p9fa0fdbfed273ba0 at mail.gmail.com>,
>
> Freddie Cash writes:
>  >Oh, gods, please, no!  That is one of the things I absolutely hate
>  >about Debian (and its derivatives).  There are some packages on Debian
>  >where they use separate text files for each configuration option
>  >(ProFTPd, for examples).  It is a huge mess of directories and files
>  >that makes it a *royal* PITA to edit at the CLI.
>  >
>  >Yes, a scheme like that is better for GUI tools, but it really makes
>  >things more difficult for non-GUI users/uses (like headless servers
>  >managed via SSH).
>
>  Try managing a few hundred mostly-but-not-entirely-identical machines
>  and you really begin to appreciate the value of this approach.  It is
>  orders of magnitude easier to drop one file into the central config
>  repository that does *one thing* than it is to manage a dozen
>  not-quite-identical copies of a monolithic configuration file, keeping
>  in sync the parts that are supposed to be in sync, and keeping the
>  parts that are supposed to be different, different.
>
>  If FreeBSD were able to do this, it might have a bit more traction at
>  my place of employment.

We do, using a "include file" setup.  A main, monolothic config file
for everything that is common between all systems, and then include a
separate file that is specific to that machine.  We based this on the
/etc/rc.conf vs /etc/rc.conf.local setup.  Works quite nicely across
our 100+ servers.

No need to break things down to the "multiple directories full of
symlinks and itty-bitty files" setup, though.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com