Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 23:17:08 -0500 From: Mike Makonnen <mtm@identd.net> To: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> Cc: wollman@lcs.mit.edu, wes@softweyr.com, arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: syslog.conf syntax change (multiple program/host specifications) Message-ID: <20030213041709.XOQ23484.out001.verizon.net@kokeb.ambesa.net> In-Reply-To: <p05200f10ba70be419852@[128.113.24.47]> References: <20030210114930.GB90800@melusine.cuivre.fr.eu.org> <200302120632.36583.wes@softweyr.com> <200302121411.h1CEBRSe025071@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <200302121521.33506.wes@softweyr.com> <200302121615.h1CGFdGG025691@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <p05200f10ba70be419852@[128.113.24.47]>
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On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 22:40:17 -0500 Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> wrote: > I bounce back and forth on XML. I can see that it's useful for > some things, but I don't think it is appropriate for config > files that a user is going to type in. And I certainly don't > want to *require* XML config files, because some of our (RPI) > config files are automatically generated and we assume the > same format of file across a number of unix platforms. Correct me if I'm wrong, but XML was never meant for humans to parse. "Human-readable" doesn't mean the user is supposed to go in and edit it. It means that if you should ever hit a worst case scenario, a human can always go in with a text editor and manipulate the data directly, not necessarily that it would be easy to do so. The primary goal of XML is to allow non-intelligent machines/software to understand the structure of a piece of data. > > I think that trying to XML-ize config files is something that > will take some time and effort to do right, and I suspect we > would be better off if that was put off for 6.0. I don't think > we want to drive our users nuts by constantly changing the > format of these files during a stable-branch, and I doubt we'll > have the perfect file format in time for 5.1-release. There's no way in hell we or any other BSD is going exclusively to XML for any particular configuration file. Some Linux distro might try it, but it would never work. The current file layouts are too entrenched. What would work; however, is XML as an intermediate data layout. The XML would sit between some program the user can use to make choices and the underlying text file. Take rc.conf for example. You could put all that data in XML format and some gui would let the user choose whatever he/she wanted and that would then be piped through an XSLT script that renders it in the current key=value layout. The data would be kept in defaults/rc.conf.xml and defaults/rc.conf would just become another generated file. Cheers. -- Mike Makonnen | GPG-KEY: http://www.identd.net/~mtm/mtm.asc mtm@identd.net | Fingerprint: D228 1A6F C64E 120A A1C9 A3AA DAE1 E2AF DBCC 68B9 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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