On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 23:20:37 +0100 "Joe Desbonnet" jdesbonnet@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Sure, or freedesktop.org, freestandards.org etc.. But really all that is needed is a defacto standard based on a prevalent solution. So talking about it and trying to form a committee etc. is likely the long way to a solution.
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.
No doubt.
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).
The backend used to store the configuration database isn't really all that important once you have a standard API which can be used by applications and CLI/GUI config editors.
To ease migration, adapter modules could be written to dynamically translate existing config files to/from the new format.
Yup, and the package Shane mentioned (Elektra) has this.
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.
I don't think this will actually be a huge step forward or make the difference to anyone deciding whether to embrace Linux or not. But there's no doubt it would be at least nice incremental improvement.
Sean