Re: Sysinst GSOC project

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 11:58:55PM -0500, Zach Wegner wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> My name is Zach Wegner. I am 20 years old, and I attend Austin
> Community College in Austin, TX. I have been selected for the Google
> Summer of Code to help out the NetBSD project. I've been using NetBSD
> for several years, and I am excited to become a part of the community.

Welcome, Zach, and congratulations on being picked for SoC - a number
of us have been looking forward to this project being completed.

> The most important part of this project is the file format. What I am
> wanting in this format is to be easily readable and editable by
> humans, as well as being very flexible. Because of this, I think it
> would be best to use a very simple, sh script-like format. I have an
> example file that I set up:
> http://www.geocities.com/zwegner/sysinst.SAMPLE.conf.html
> There are some missing parts, and I have since noticed that the
> slashes are kind of ambiguous, being used for options and directories.
> I'm thinking of maybe replacing the option slashes with ?s. If anybody
> has any really serious, super-critical reason that this format is bad,
> or any little suggestions about the finer points of the syntax, please
> say so. But again, I don't have the time to implement a very
> complicated parser, and I think the sample format should handle the
> task well, so I'd prefer that we don't have a flamewar over this.

Agreed - perhaps a '|' to distinguish between options, or wrap
them all in a csh-like {a,b,c,d} group?

I like the simplicity of your format, though.  Having said that, I'm
sure the XML bigots^Wadvocates will get on my case here.  Personally,
I believe that XML could be an option some other time, but that SoC
projects are time-limited, and so that's not an option here.  In
addition, having to hand edit XML isn't the end of the world, but it
is also highly undesirable, and certainly not something that one
should have to admit to doing in public.
 
So please, folks on tech-install, mail me the stuff about XML, so
Zach can stay focussed on his project, which is definitely useful
and highly desirable for NetBSD.

Regards,
Alistair