I just *had* to comment.

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Wednesday 02 June 2004 11:33 am, dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 10:42:47AM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> > ~/.* is not sufficient to deal with "global settings".
>
> No, it's clearly per-user.
>
> The obvious extension is /etc/dotfiles/* (or the name of your
> choice) with the same syntax and access methods, and using
> filesystem permissions to make most things read-only to the
> common user.

How about /etc/sysconfig?  Does that work for you?

> > However a
> > registry isn't sufficient, either.  Think distributed systems (i.e.,
> > I've got 1000 machines and the software is installed on a central file
> > server (not on each machine) and run out of the network file system).
>
> In which case you use rsync on /etc/dotfiles from the
> appropriate central repository branch (webservers get theirs
> from repository/webservers/etc/dotfiles, login machines from
> repository/logins/etc/dotfiles, etc.).

Wait.  I thought the proposal was a central binary registry file.  How are you 
going to use rsync to synchronize one part of one binary file?  Unless every 
single machine is absolutely identical and has the same ACL.

> > Registries of all forms fall flat in the face of distributed file
> > systems, unless there is some standard way to read the global registry
> > info out of the file system.

The best way to handle that is some equivalent of #include, where the CPOTSF 
has a mechanism for saying "suck in this other CPOTSF as if its entries were 
here in this CPOTSF, then let entries in this one override those values".

Of course you're up to your next paradox.  If you want to store your mount 
information in the registry...

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