> >
>On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, Curt Sampson wrote:
>
>> 
>> Well, it depends on what you mean by `unified.' If you mean a
>> database of some sort that's more unified than a bunch of files in
>> /etc, one for each application, then no, I don't want to see that.
>> As soon as you get into a unified single database it becomes *very*
>> hard to track exactly who has made what changes and where. And, of
>> course, such a thing tends to be difficult to maintain in text
>> format anyway. There is, of course, no question of using any other
>> format, since that would go right against the unix philosophy and
>> make the standard tools we already have (sed, grep, etc.) useless
>> for manipulating it.
>> 
>
>Where there are databse lookups the databases are built from editable
>ascii files. If this philosphy was maintained could a scheme be
>developed that was acceptable ?
>

Sure. In some sense this is what the termcap format was about, and also
the .ini format. Don't get me wrong I *don't* want binary information
you can't easily modify- anyone who lived through Sun's NSE environment
can tell you about that. However, billyuns of little conf files strewn
all over the place each with a different format is just the wrong thing
to do. I don't believe BSD folks see this that strongly- all current
flavors of *BSD don't seem to really go overboard this way like either
SVr4 or Solaris or RedHat linux.