On Wed, 2012-07-11 at 19:40 -0400, Brian Mathis wrote:
>
> The use of "mv -v ...{,_}" is too clever for this kind of educational
> document, and should be changed to spell out the full "mv" command. I
> get what you're doing there, but the purpose of the document is not to
> teach clever uses of bash, it's to make it obvious to people that
> you're renaming the file. It will trip up the flow of reading for all
> but the most knowledgeable users, and users who don't understand it
> will be totally lost.
I'm not trying to be clever, I just don't like to type it twice if I
can avoid it and the typing the higher the chance for a typo. I don't
have a problem having both forms. I'll add it and see what you think.
> In most documents and scripts, I usually spell out the short form
> options as well, such as using "--verbose". Short forms save you
> typing, but documentation should not trip people up if they don't know
> what the option means.
Normally, I expect, if people don't understand a command, they will
refer to the man page for the command. However, to my constant
disappointment, I understand that many people aren't looking for long
term knowledge improvement, they are looking for a recipe to blindly
follow.
> Also, I find the use of "_" to be obtuse and highly error prone if one
> were to actually run a server that way. It's far more obvious to use
> "disabled", which makes it very clear that those items are disabled.
> It may work for you but only because that's a convention you came up
> with so you're used to it, but we're not in dos 8.3 days with
> filenames, so why not be more descriptive?
Having both forms should make it plain that people can use any
convention they wish. System administration is not a fixed target.
Like many things, there are many ways to accomplish the same result.
When approaching a system that someone else is administrating, we should
try to maintain the existing conventions instead of forcing our own
ideas onto a server for which we are not the primary responsible party.
> In section 6.4, is there a reason not to make a "vhosts.conf" file
> that contains the "Include" in the in the conf.d/ directory, instead
> of appending to the httpd.conf, or do you run into ordering issues
> there? I try to avoid changing the distro files if possible.
Sections 6 and 7 are optional. There are certainly arguments against
customization. In the past, upgrades might have replaced all files
including configuration files. In that case, creating a vhosts.conf
file in the conf.d directory to separate the directive would have been a
must. However, the Linux distributions I have used for the past decade
or so have avoided replacing existing configuration files, expecting
they might be customized.
That said, I like the suggestion. It would allow for the virtual host
files to be packaged into an RPM file that could be installed on
multiple web hosts.
>
> ❧ Brian Mathis