Netinfo

Netinfo is gone as of Leopard (). Good riddance.

Netinfo is Mac OS X's way of bringing order from the chaos of Unix configuration files. While I understand the motivation, it was and remains a horribly bad idea.

The motivation is obvious: Unix system configuration files are scattered about and have no consistency. The traditional Unix password file and many others separate fields by colons, but other files may use spaces or tabs or even other formats. Netinfo consolidates information into a database that can be queried in a consistent manner to look up users, printers, groups, servers, mounts, etc. The lookups don't even have to be local; a Netinfo database on a server can provide the needed response.

But it's flawed. Some of the Unix tradition is just too deeply buried, so Netinfo can't replace the usual files and has to live alongside, which causes confusion. For example, /etc/hosts is still used, even though much Apple documentation said that it was not. Yet Netinfo also has limited host information and can import /etc/hosts if you wish. There is a traditional /etc/passwd file, but it doesn't contain all the users that Netinfo knows about.

Databases can become corrupt much more easily than text files, and can be much more difficult to fix when they do. There are other advantages to plain text files, such as the ease of using Unix tools like "grep" to search through them.

Again, I understand why Apple wanted to do this. But if you must reinvent the wheel (in this case because it's a wheel that doesn't always roll smoothly), you need to do it completely, and you need to do it better. I wouldn't object to Netinfo half so much if it used plists for its data storage and was 100% implemented with no traditional Unix files at all. But as it is now, I think it is in some ways actually worse than what it replaced.

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