On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 5:23 AM, Ed W lists@wildgooses.com wrote:
P.S. The "idiot" who kept breaking the plain text format file in my original setup was .... da da ... me ... So given I think of myself as reasonably technical, I would claim that text format "databases" are way more fragile than you might expect.... (good luck getting a non technical user not to break the text format file from time to time...)
But this is more an issue of exposing the system to human failure than it is a choice of using a flat file. If the flat file is generated by some other system, and maybe merged with other data, and never handled by a human except in extraordinary situations, it should be fine. This is used as a justification for XML being a text format (that a human can read it and even edit it, in non-routine situations).
FYI, I have done hand editing of /etc/{group,passwd,shadow} to add users. So far I've never killed root. I still have to at times. Most recently I did so with Ubuntu because the user management tool couldn't get it right (I needed a specific UID/GID arrangement for compatibility with other systems, and the GUI tool refused ... it would let me do one or the other, but not both at the same time).