Linux Succumbs to Creeping Windows-Itis Jan 14, 2009, 15 :01 UTC (14 Talkback[s]) (4282 reads) (Other stories by Carla Schroder)
"In the olden days most applications and services could be controlled with a single plain-text configuration file, so once you learned your way around it changes were fast and easy, and simple to replicate across multiple machines. But somewhere along the way a trend emerged that split these nice, useful single files into giant herds of files. So what was once simple, elegant, and useful became a big fat headache...
"That's just one example. Who else remembers when PAM was controlled by a single, comprehensible file, /etc/pam.conf? Then it was exploded into a giant wad of separate files for each application that used it, a tangled mess of redundant and inter-dependent includes. Adding to the fun, Red Hat and Debian each have their own special, different ways of configuring PAM."
