Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomjakubowski | Hacker News Reader

> Given things like this: "The default configuration is defined during compilation [so a configuration file is only needed when it is necessary to deviate from those defaults....]"

I don't get it. What's so bad about that?

View on HN

It means that a configuration file on two similar machines could have radically different behaviors.

That's always the case due to different software versions.

This implies they can be different with the same versions.

You might want to cast your mind back to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9809427 .

The practical result is that on a machine without a configuration file, you can’t determine what NTP server it’s trying to use without having access to the source code (or some compile time include) or doing some other trickery.

That is a ludicrous design decision and is indicative of the developers having zero empathy towards their users.

Once you could just maintain some file from etc in a version control and setup a machine predictably with a script three lines long

Then it came puppet chef and a shitload other stuff because ‘devops’ which make the task easier once and then fuck up your environment at every single upgrade changing defaults, changing dependencies and changing the environment you run

I swear what could be done repeatedly the same way for a decade now it’s a frail mess that requires yearly fiddling to keep it running and current

No wonder companies need so much devops people/time these days, they need them to keep following the frail shit that’s dropped into stable distro.

Systemd is just one more thing that you have to reconfigure at every release because changes defaults subtly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com