From owner-freebsd-arch Wed Apr 4 3:22:24 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from dire.bris.ac.uk (dire.bris.ac.uk [137.222.10.60]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5138137B729 for ; Wed, 4 Apr 2001 03:22:21 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk) Received: from mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk by dire.bris.ac.uk with SMTP-PRIV with ESMTP; Wed, 4 Apr 2001 11:22:09 +0100 Received: from cmjg (helo=localhost) by mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk with local-esmtp (Exim 3.16 #1) id 14kkP6-0002Jz-00; Wed, 04 Apr 2001 11:20:44 +0100 Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 11:20:44 +0100 (BST) From: Jan Grant To: Cyrille Lefevre Cc: freebsd-arch Subject: Re: configuration files, XML? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 4 Apr 2001, Cyrille Lefevre wrote: > the idea is to keep data where they are in the format they are and to > have some sort of configurable api which interpret them through the > appropriate gui. I think it's better to keep the content separate and to generate old-format configs on demand. We do this with master.passwd and vipw already, essentially, but it needs something more general while we're waiting for the world to catch on to what a good idea XML* config files are :-/ Although this brings up another issue: stuff like chfn, passwd might be written to modify the old-format file - the synchronisation between old- and new- format config files needs to be two-way unless the system utilities are taught about XML config files too. > maybe I am totally wrong about the xml possibilities ? It's just a syntax. If you can write it down, you can write it down in XML. It might not look very pretty, but it can be done. jan * For "XML" read "any commonly applicable format" -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287163 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk perl -e 's?ck?t??print:perl==pants if $_="Just Another Perl Hacker\n"' To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message