On Sat, 2005-11-19 at 08:24 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote:
--On Saturday, November 19, 2005 4:35 PM +0200 Gilboa Davara
<gilboada(a)netvision.net.il> wrote:
> I was talking about /simple text/ parsers, no XML one.
How simple? Set the bar too low and you cripple some uses of it. XML's
value is in generality. You don't actually have to use all of it. Simple
applications can use very simple styles, and yet still be able to leverage
the advanced features for corner cases like unusual characters and
character sets. There's no requirement that your config file has to be
complex. Package developers will have to support what they define, and
won't want to spend all their time explaining a complex schema, unless
their application is equally complex.
Again, I fail to see why we need complex text inside the package
manager.
Even if you must, you can always shove the translation strings
into /usr/share/locale. (Or /etc/scm/locale if you which to load it from
within initrd.)
It seems the people tend to confuse the application configuration
(AKA /etc/samba/smb.conf) and the service configuration (/etc/init.d/smb
or /etc/scm/samba.conf).
The service manager (scm) configuration should be as simple as it gets.
Same goes, in my eyes, with the service manager itself.
For those who love var=value pairs, one could always use m4 to expand that
into equivalent XML, the way sendmail does to create its legacy cf file
from the much simpler mc file.
Adding yet another step of complexity just to fix a dead service.
Gilboa