Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 14:27:40 +0100 (BST) From: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk> To: Jack Rusher <jar@integratus.com> Cc: "freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: configuration files, XML? Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0103281424230.12694-100000@mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <3AC0D4A7.CF09E4A3@integratus.com>
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On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Jack Rusher wrote: > Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group wrote: > > > > around the bush. What specifically are you proposing? What would > > This is a mass reply. I will now address the following: > > o What's the problem? > > Unix file formats have traditionally been created in an ad hoc > fashion in whatever format the author of that subsystem felt like. This > leads to a seemingly random collection of position dependent, tagged, > and line oriented file formats. > o What do you want to do about it? > > What I would like to see is a set of constraint files that describe > the syntax of configuration files on the system, a consistent "style" > for these file formats, and an API to access a library that knows how to > deal with the underlying files. I would suggest that the library > support loadable file format modules and that a hacked up constraint > language that's able to express current file formats is the first module > we write. After we have that much done, some enterprising soul could go > around and retrofit this configuration file library into existing > applications and subsystems. There's a reasonable 'half-way house': use XML to define config file formats and validators (the current crop of tools available is good for this) - use XSLT to process these into the formats that external applications require. Barring the usual problems of keeping source and output in sync, this gives you a (standard) semi-declarative way of describing the relationship between XML and .conf file. You can also process and validate at the same time: see schematron (don't have a URL to hand at the moment) for example. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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