Naming Guidelines

For this library to become a success it is necessary that many applications, utilities and daemons make use of it. To ensure that their naming structure remains consistent and free from naming clashes I would like to recommend the following strategy:

Possible Key Name Reservation

Currently what you call the entries within your sections is entirely up to you. But maybe at some stage it would be feasible to have a special section somewhere which could contain a set of standard entries for each application. I suppose those could be used to stop, start and restart applications - this would mean that the sysadmin would use something like an enhanced kunfedit. Once the changes where made kunfedit would consult those special names and run commands to synchronize the system with the modifications. But maybe that idea is for someone else to implement since such a system would only make use of the kunf library - it would be a sophisticated client application.

Improvements

For work to be done on the library itself refer to the TODO file. Help would be greatly appreciated. You can contact me at my anti-web-crawler-spam-address.

Related Work

Shortly before I completed this release it occurred to me to search for work already done on the topic of Linux system configuration.

To my surprise I found an entire mailing list dedicated to the topic. I was pleased to see that that group and I had many ideas in common. It seemed that someone on that group had started work on a library similar to my own, but it seens that that effort had died off. I hope my work can implement some of their ideas...

I also found a system configuration/management system called linuxconf written by Jacques Gelinas. I have not yet had time and space to investigate it fully, but it seems to be a comprehensive package. I think there is potential for applications using kunf to make life easier for linuxconf since linuxconf could use the kunf API to access the data of the application instead of having to construct its own parser - but that is just a thought...


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