Linux: concerns over systemd adoption and Debian's decision to switch

Wed Oct 22 19:47:01 UTC 2014

On October 22, 2014 at 07:04 rsk at gsp.org (Rich Kulawiec) wrote:
 > I've seen similar tactical mistakes when developers insist that
 > information *must* be stored in a relational database -- even though
 > plain old ordinary text files are perfectly adequate for the task,
 > are easier to debug, are easier to fix, and easier to maintain.
 > There is an unfortunate tendency among many developers to attempt
 > to wring the very last bit of performance out of systems and not
 > to take into consideration that the scarcest and most expensive
 > resource is the system administrator.  Saving a few microseconds
 > or a handful of bytes here and there is a horribly bad idea if it
 > chews up an extra hour or week of SA time.

Obviously it depends on the application, generalities are dangerous.

But one advantage of DBs are that you automatically get all the
mechanics of failover, distribution, backup and recovery, atomicity,
consistency, integrity, security, etc. that come with the DB
essentially for "free".

There is a tendency that one starts with this idea of keeping it
simple, such as text files, and then proceeds to build all these
mechanisms themselves, usually poorly.

Look at how many different formats of configuration files we have on a
typical *ix system, nearly one per application/daemon that needs a
config file. Why do I have to know how to properly modify a passwd
file, named config, logrotate, tcp wrappers, mail daemon configs,
anti-spam configs, etc etc etc (usually in /etc!) down to what they
will each take for a comment or separator or stanza syntax.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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