Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 15:18:59 -0500 (EST) From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> To: Thomas Quinot <thomas@cuivre.fr.eu.org> Cc: arch@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: syslog.conf syntax change (multiple program/host specifications) Message-ID: <200302122018.h1CKIxjT026982@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> In-Reply-To: <20030212182852.GA94317@melusine.cuivre.fr.eu.org> References: <20030210114930.GB90800@melusine.cuivre.fr.eu.org> <200302112310.h1BNAUBS019097@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <20030212182852.GA94317@melusine.cuivre.fr.eu.org>
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<<On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 19:28:52 +0100, Thomas Quinot <thomas@cuivre.fr.eu.org> said: > The benefit of such changes is often unclear; configuration files should > be easy to read and modify for a human user. Whether or not they are > easy to parse is irrelevant once the parser is written. :) The benefit of such changes is that, when new features are necessary (e.g., MAC labels for servers started by inetd), it is not necessary to create yet another kluge to shoehorn the new feature into the old, inflexible syntax. AIX actually had sort-of-the-right-idea, in that most of the AIX-specific configuration files are lexically identical, vary very little in syntax, and are easily extensible. Unfortunately, there is no great community of "stanza" format processing tools like there are for XML or even (gack) Windows .INI files. Don't get me wrong: I'm not putting forward XML because I like it; I am however noting that none of the comparably-capable alternatives have anything like the broad support that XML does. -GAWollman To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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