RE: environment variables vs defaults

[Ian Lister]

On Wed, 3 Jan 2001 ian.mondragon@bankofamerica.com wrote:
[some ruthless snipping below]
>as for the debian issue, i have absolutely NO clue - i run freebsd almost
>exclusively.  the driving force behind what i envision this project becoming
>is simply that i'm sick of .rc, .conf, .whatever files.
[snip]

>therefore, the project that i started (which i am tentatively calling
>GNUSys) is not just an env-to-defaults tool, but rather a 3-level system
[snip]

>the third level is a defaults database for the system itself, obviously
>protected from evil hackery as much as possible, that provides the same
>functionality for system applications/processes as level 2 does for user
>applications.

[snip]

>please feel free to offer suggestions...

Ian,

Your third level sounds a lot like NetInfo and lookupd; would that be a
reasonable assessment? Or are you thinking more of trapping each and every
config file read and write by any process and routing them to the defaults
database? The latter sounds like a *lot* of voodoo, but of course the
existing lookupd replaces only a few common files (e.g. /etc/resolv.conf,
services, passwd, group, etc), and only those that have file specific
library calls (e.g. gethostbyname, getservbyname, etc). Anything more than
that surely needs application support?

Ian