Re: sysinst split project - The Configuration File

[David Young <dyoung%pobox.com@localhost>]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 09:35:19PM +0100, Jean-Yves Migeon wrote:
> On 12/14/09 18:57, Volker A. Brandt wrote:
> [snip]
> >>As for trying to count the number of people who "know" one language or
> >>another, well that's a specious argument in this context.  XML syntax
> >>might be easy to know, and a given XML DTD might be simple to
> >>understand, but SGML style syntax overall is a _horrible_ syntax for
> >>both humans and computers to use.
> >
> >I respectfully disagree.  I find it not so bad, and computers don't care.
> 
> While computers do not care, XML processing is heavy, given all the
> tools required to parse just one simple XML file together with its
> DTD/Schema.

Jean-Yves,

Most of the existing XML tools are too CPU- and memory-intensive, I
agree, but NetBSD happens to be the center for improvements.  Producing
a lightweight alternative for XML processing was the concern of a NetBSD
GSoC 2009 project that I mentored.  Xmlgrep, for search/extraction
on XML streams, is very usable, and a program called xmlsed, for
transforming XML streams, is under development.  By design, xmlgrep
is FAST and it uses memory conservatively.  Furthermore, the xmlgrep
binary and its light dependencies are quite a bit smaller than you might
expect:

% ls -l `which xmlgrep`
-rwxr-x---  1 dyoung  wasabi   47K Nov 16 17:57 
/home/dyoung/scratch-cuw/xmltools/xmlgrep/xmlgrep
% ldd `which xmlgrep`
/home/dyoung/scratch-cuw/xmltools/xmlgrep/xmlgrep:
        -lexpat.1 => /usr/pkg/lib/libexpat.so.1
        -lc.12 => /usr/lib/libc.so.12
% ls -l /usr/pkg/lib/libexpat.so.1.5.2
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root    wheel   155K Jun 18  2008 /usr/pkg/lib/libexpat.so.1.5.2

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung%ojctech.com@localhost      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933