I think the only way this will happen is for a consortium of interests in the Linux (and similar OSes) world to come up with a formal standard (file format, best practices and API bindings for common languages). Then cast it in concrete by submitting it to a standards body eg EMCA.
If the standard is good then I believe people will use it. Parsing config files is tedious and error prone. Often developers forget about things like international characters and have to change the format after a few releases.
At it's simplest this standard could be a simple name-value pair text file. But it should also cater for complex configurations and allow a schema to define and describe the file (and perhaps the GUI used to edit it).
To ease migration, adapter modules could be written to dynamically translate existing config files to/from the new format.
This would be a huge step forward for Linux. Right now the /etc directory is littered with different formats. Many are not documented outside of the source coded used to read them.
Joe.
On 3/27/06, Shane Stixrud shane@geeklords.org wrote:
On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, sean wrote:
GUI users don't want to be hunting through text files anyway, they want nice settings windows and wizards. Anyone hand editing config files better know what's going on anyway; the current situation isn't too bad there.
This is not a gui issue, nor is it just an "end user issue". This attitude of "anyone hand editing config files better know what's going on anyways" becomes largely invalid when a standard methodology exists.
gconf already provides a reasonable way to change settings from the command line and via GUI tools. What would you change?
Gconf shows the gnome people realized early on having a standard method for storing and modifying configuration data is important, to the gnome platform... We are not talking about JUST the gnome platform and my guess is gconf would not meet the needs of Fedora as a whole.
No matter what you come up with though, it will be many years before you see wide spread adoption. If anything, you might consider a project to create a system-wide config editor that knows all the different formats etc and provides a consistent CLI/GUI interface.
Projects already exist http://www.libelektra.org/Main_Page for example. The problem is not that code doesn't exist, the problem is one of getting everyone to: a) agree its desirable b) Agreeing/creating an implementation c) having a plan for getting where we want to be "many years" later.
I don't see how a few people can make this happen, it is going to take some serious influence to make any real world progress.
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