Use of commands to change settings (was: fai.conf changes)

[Peter Keller]

On Sat, Mar 01, 2014 at 06:19:44PM +0200, Toomas Tamm wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 08:41:54PM +0100, Thomas Lange wrote:
> > FAI_CONFIG_SRC in fai.conf is not copied into the nfsroot any
> > more. Use fai-chboot -u instead.
> 
> I would like to express my opinion against the shift of paradigm of
> Unix administration, which has been growing in recent years, and now
> also creeping into FAI. In the "old good days" configuration of a
> Unix/Linux host was done by modifying files, usually under /etc . This
> has the added benefit that such files can be easily reviewed, backed
> up and later restored to a known working state, controlled with tools
> such as Subversion/Git, cfengine, etc.

As a user of FAI (but mostly a luker here), I'd have to agree. I know
how to edit text files just fine, but I'm always worred that some user
friendly tool will wipe out some changes I made somewhere without me
realizing it (or that it would) and then it'll be hours of debugging to
figure out why.  I've run into situations in the FAI docs where I just
can't tell if running the tools will alter things that I'm configuring
or changing in the FAI nfsroot or not. This leaves me in a situation
where I run the tools once to set things up, and then never run them
again and edit everything by hand.

Thank you.

-pete