[CentOS] discussioning how software gets obsolete in general [was Re: Does anyone use tcp wrappers (hosts.allow/hosts.deny) anymore?]

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 05:18:42PM -0400, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>> On the other hand, what justifiable reason was there for the massively
>> increased complexity of grub2?
>
> Probably none, but legacy grub didn't have support for booting on UEFI
> platforms, and no one wanted to add that support, let alone maintain it.
>
Yeah, and a lot of us are unfriendly to UEFI....

> In recent Fedora, I added rudimentary support for extlinux as a bootloader
> when you want to avoid the grub2 complexity. (This is a great example,
> though, of something that may not trickle down from Fedora, unless someone
> wants to step up to make the feature more robust.)
>
>> And why do all configuration files suddenly
>> *desperately* need to be xml?
>
> If only the grub2 config files were xml! Instead, they're shell scripts
> which generate shell scripts which generate the actual configuration.

*gag* That's the impression I got from my netbook (Ubuntu netbook remix).

I get *real* tired of people who are clever, and bit themselves in the
back doing it. I'm a firm believer in elegance... and simplicity is
usually elegant.

> (Sadly, I'm not making that up. I think those might even source other
> shells scripts.)
>
> XML configruation happens when GUI developers write config files, mostly.
> But fortunately it is not a universal disease -- systemd, for example, for
> all its controvery, uses lovely sysadmin-friendly key=value config files.

I have one thing to say about that: to quote a friend: "ah, your mother
dresses you funny, and you need a mouse to delete files" (M. Pins)

         mark