Shane Stixrud (shane@geeklords.org) said:
I see no reason why it would not be possible and desirable to have a plain text compatible configuration file standard that is universal between subsystems, services and applications (besides it being a lot of work). It seems to me that the complexities of existing configuration tools (authconfig, system-config-samba etc...) are largely due to this same fundamental issue.
Basically, the problem arises in trying to move the inertia of 50 upstream applications to move to a "new, better" format versus the pain of trying to consistently maintain such patches for 50 applications outside of upstream.
Bill