[ On Monday, March 6, 2000 at 23:02:38 (-0500), Curt Sampson wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: FreeBSD's "periodic" script.
>
> Personally, I really hate the {xxx}foo style of naming things,
> because it makes stuff a pain to enable and disable. I'd prefer to
> see a configuration file which says which scripts get run and in
> what order.

Well, even in terms of keystrokes editing a configuration file is much
more difficult than "mv file OFF.file".

By the time you take into account the potential complexity of yet
another new configuration file format (or dangerous subtleties
introduced by using a much larger configuration language than necessary,
such as /bin/sh), as opposed to the relative simplicity and visual
elegance of simply putting the procedures in appropriately named files,
I think your argument loses a lot of its steam....

In this case all we're really talking about though is a basic framework
to organise a set of procedures and manage their output.  If you add in
a new configuration file to control their order you might as well just
list them all individually in your crontab and be done with it....

Hierarchical filesystems are extremely good abstractions for organising
collections of information -- why not use them for what they're good at?

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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