>>>>> On Sat, 8 Jul 2006 15:12:10 -0400,
      "James K. Lowden" <jklowden@schemamania.org> said:

> But if one were to consider such a thing, would it not make better sense
> to take advantage of 20-odd years of experience, and use a relational
> database instead?  

Yeah, for database like /etc/passwd, group, hosts, etc,
relational database is far better abstraction than XML.

Of course, there are applications that XML is suitable than RDB or
anything else, but currently XML is too overestimated, IMHO.
(e.g. SOAP, programming langauges which syntax is XML.)

But, honestly, I'd like to keep system detabase as is by default.
If you want to use RDB (or XML database), I think nsswitch data source
backend is the place to put it.
-- 
soda