Comment by immibis

I don't like these systems where configuration is built from a million separate files. They're unpleasant to work with.

The best reason to do it this way seems to be that files are the unit of package management. Perhaps we need a smarter package manager.

My nginx.conf life got better when I deleted sites-available and sites-enabled and defined my sites inline in nginx.conf.

The only thing worse is when the configuration is actually a program that generates the configuration, like in ALSA.

And the only thing worse than ALSA style is Xorg style, with a default configuration generated by C code and you can only apply changes to it without seeing it. Xorg also has this weird indirection thing where the options are like Option "Foo" "Bar" instead of Foo "Bar", but that's a nitpick in comparison.