> One of the worst examples I came up with was for /etc/shells, a
> newline delimited list is one of the best structures for a list of
> things.

But "a list of things" is a wrong thing for /etc/shells.  This was
probably driven by the botched API (which asks not "is this shell
acceptable?" but rather "tell me the list of acceptable shells", which
has wired into it the notion that the list is not only easily
enumerable but small).  But the fundamental facility (a way to
configure what shells are acceptable) really needs a way to say things
like "anything in this directory is acceptable" or even "anything is
acceptable".  (Yes, there are lots of systems where that is not a sane
choice, but there are also systems where it is, and there is no way to
configure such a thing now short of hacking on every program that calls
getusershell().)

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