Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 12 Feb 2003 22:40:17 -0500
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>, Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>
Cc:        arch@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: syslog.conf syntax change (multiple program/host specifications)
Message-ID:  <p05200f10ba70be419852@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <200302121615.h1CGFdGG025691@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
References:  <20030210114930.GB90800@melusine.cuivre.fr.eu.org> <200302120632.36583.wes@softweyr.com> <200302121411.h1CEBRSe025071@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <200302121521.33506.wes@softweyr.com> <200302121615.h1CGFdGG025691@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 11:15 AM -0500 2/12/03, Garrett Wollman wrote:
><<On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> said:
>
>>  So you're preferring the software over the human operator.
>
>I would not necessarily jump to that conclusion.  What I want to
>eschew is a proliferation of lots of little languages, each one
>subtly different, such that users are forced to learn all of them.
>We already have:
>
>	foocap

Besides my favorite /etc/printcap file, there's also /etc/hosts.lpd
and /etc/hosts.equiv which are referenced by lpd.  Those two are of
particular interest to me right now, as I want to add some options
which would be set based on what host is sending the job to lpd.  I
either have to add a third file, or I have to add some options to
entries in /etc/hosts.lpd.

>	fstab
>       [...etc...]
>
>Every single one of these has a different syntax that the admin
>must learn in addition to the relevant semantics, and which any
>sort of front-end or configuration-analysis tool must be able
>to interpret, in order to do anything useful with the programs
>they control.  The benefit of something like XML (or Lisp, for
>that matter) is that, while still providing for functionally
>significant differences, the *lexical* structure is identical
>across many functions -- and this makes it much easier to use
>other tools (like structured editors) to maintain and document
>the files.

I bounce back and forth on XML.  I can see that it's useful for
some things, but I don't think it is appropriate for config
files that a user is going to type in.  And I certainly don't
want to *require* XML config files, because some of our (RPI)
config files are automatically generated and we assume the
same format of file across a number of unix platforms.

I think that trying to XML-ize config files is something that
will take some time and effort to do right, and I suspect we
would be better off if that was put off for 6.0.  I don't think
we want to drive our users nuts by constantly changing the
format of these files during a stable-branch, and I doubt we'll
have the perfect file format in time for 5.1-release.

Wes's original proposal is a simple extension to the current
syntax, and I think we could decide on what we think about that
as a near-term change, without tieing it to the discussion of
what to do about XML-izing all config files.

As to Wes's patch, I like the new feature but I don't think the
config file should be quite so cryptic.  I guess I would like
to think about it some more.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?p05200f10ba70be419852>