Similar problems occur with other formats. Try a multibyte character
one
byte of which is '"' or '\n' in .ini format.
XML also makes the format extensible and means you already have tools to
autogenerate it, to turn it into up2date lines, yum lines, html, or edit it.
This was something I was talking about with some other folks on irc - if
there was an xml representation of a 'definition' of a
repository/channel - then you could write converters/renderers for all
the other layouts.
going from xml to any other format is pretty easy.
-sv