Re: what's next for the linux kernel?

From: Valdis . Kletnieks
Date: Wed Oct 05 2005 - 00:37:27 EST


On Tue, 04 Oct 2005 18:40:33 CDT, Chase Venters said:
> Work on dbus and HAL should give us good improvements in these areas. One
> remaining challenge I see is system configuration - each daemon tends to
> adopt its own syntax for configuration, which means that providing a GUI for
> novice users to manage these systems means attacking each problem separately
> and in full. Now I certainly wouldn't advocate a Windows-style registry,
> because I think it's full of obvious problems. Nevertheless, it would be nice
> to have some kind of configuration editor abstraction library that had some
> sort of syntax definition database to allow for some interesting work on
> GUIs.

Anybody who tries to do this without at least understanding the design choices
made by AIX's SMIT tool deserves to re-invent it, poorly.

> In any case, I think pretty much all of this work lives outside the kernel.

Amen to that - although the whole hotplug/udev/sysfs aggregation has at least
made a semi-sane way to find out from userspace what the kernel thinks is going on...

Are there any drivers out there that don't play nice with sysfs? If so, should
a mention of them be added to http://kerneljanitors.org/TODO ?

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