Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Automatic recreation of config files

There should be no excuse for programs not working if I delete their config files unless its globally available (such as apache). If I delete the Xorg.conf, next reboot, Xorg should still be able to boot, and there should a working copy of xorg.conf sitting there for me, with full commenting.

Linux distributions need to get out of the habit of creating configuration files for every program that runs as root. The programs requiring it should instead of capable of creating them. In some cases this isn't possible because the process doesn't run as root and wont have permission to do so, or there is no logical setup that can be formed (like apache, which is per website specific).

And the first one to claim this is a security risk needs to rethink things, because distributions will put a default configuration anyway. If the default configuration can be potentially dangerous, easy, next time an administrator logs into the computer, tell them that the configuration was recreated for the app, and for safety reasons, they need to either click [re-enable service] or [Keep service disabled for now]. Keeping it disabled allows them to review the configuration before reenabling it. Or, create the file, and give it a .sample extension. Don't be stupid though and just assume it should be there and bomb out.

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