[tech] A project idea...

[Ian McKellar]

On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 18:03, Andrew Bailey wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 10:55:50PM +0800, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> > 
> > The thing I love most about Unix is nice, plain text configuration
> > files. And a nice clean division between state and configuration. These 
> > are the things that make it Good. Plain text config because you can 
> > see what is set up. Division of state because you can nuke the state 
> > containing files and get things back to a useful start-point.
> >
> 
> The thing I hate about linux, is that these nice plain text configuration 
> files are put in random places ( well not quite random, they're usually
> under /etc somewhere :P ) depending on the distro or version of the 
> distro. Also versioning sucks , ( APIs are depend not so much on distro 
> version, but rather what software is installed ). Its like they want to 
> make it hard for people to deliver quality software. 

This is why you need to just support a particular distro. Supporting
RedHat 7.2 is should be as easy as supporting Solaris 8 or Windows NT 4.

In terms of API versioning we have the wonderful invention called soname
in unix where you can make dynamic linking fail when an API changes.
This combined with package dependancies should ensure that your users
have the correct APIs installed.

I've never really used any other platform to know if theres and
equivalent of soname elsewhere.

Ian [in a unix nightmare right now]
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