On Tue, 4 Jul 2006, Magnus Eriksson wrote:

>   In that case, go with XML all the way.  Convert all config files in the
> whole system to XML, have command line tools that manipulate XML the way we
> now use grep, awk, etc to manipulate text, include an XML parser library in
> the base system that anyone can use in their programs, include good
> documentation on all the above, etc.

I guess this is just what Apple did.

Just out of interest, does there exist a basic XML file editor that could
be included in the base system for editing configuration files rather than
having to use vi for this sort of thing?

>   And the next time something similar needs to be done, we'll get another
> "one-off, non-extensible special purpose file format".

This happens already, the bluetooth.conf file is a new format, which I
mostly took from FreeBSD though at least I put the parser in the library
and amalgamanted a couple of different grammars that they had. I'm still
not happy with it, and think a standard system config format and parser
would be great.

iain
(please, cut tech-kern out of replies)