Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
Granted, the tools for SELinux are not as mature as the firewall tools, but does that mean we throw out SELinux instead of improving the tools?
No one is arguing that it should necessarily be thrown out. But, should people be using it without understanding it?
I have seen the same kind of arguments about just about every major change. I remember people complaining about udev, and what was wrong with using the standard /dev setup. I heard it about the change to IPTables. I have heard it about HAL. Way too many of them boil down to I know how the old system works, so why should I learn about this new way of doing things.
It's not just a matter of learning new things, and even if it were, that would boil down to large sums of money in any business context. Think about upgrading a large farm of servers that have multiple network connections and the upgrade OS version detects the eth? devices in a different order (real example, by the way...). Now you need the staff at each location to either relocate the cables to match or edit a vast number if ifcfg-eth? files after they somehow figure out what's connected where.
> I am happy with the way things are working
now. Don't change things and make me learn a new method. I don't care if this new method has advantages over the one I know.
Try it this way: there's been 30 years of work aggregating and improving with the old assumptions. That's why we like unix-like systems. Do you want to throw that out on the chance that an untested new idea might be better?
Now, some of the new things are not going to work out, or in trying to implement them, a better way may present itself. But if nobody is willing to try the new methods, and work out the bugs that are always going to crop up when trying something new, then there will not be any progress.
Research is always a good idea but most people want the testing to be done before the new thing goes into production.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
