Re: Not all bindings are defined in cfg_ioncore.lua

On Thu, 2 Aug 2007 21:50:24 -0400 Etan Reisner <[email protected]> wrote: 

ER> On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 05:28:05PM -0400, Ted Zlatanov wrote:
>> On Thu, 2 Aug 2007 16:57:08 -0400 Etan Reisner <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
ER> Also, the fact that the bindings are in lua is unrelated to the
ER> difficulty in editing them for normal people, lua is designed to be
ER> used for configuration services and as such can be made to look
ER> rather config-file-like.
>> 
>> IMO Lua is not a good configuration language no matter what.  Neither
>> are Perl, shell, etc.  When the author punts the software configurations
>> to code, either the users learn to code that language, or they walk
>> away.  If you have a better Lua syntax, that's great, but remember it
>> has to be better than a regular configuration file too, because that's
>> what end users expect.

ER> What is a 'regular configuration file'? INI syntax? resolv.conf syntax?
ER> xorg.conf syntax? xml? What 'standard' configuration files do users deal
ER> with at this point? (Or really ever?)

Excellent question :)

Unix users expect readable configurations without code.  sendmail.cf is
horrible.  /etc/passwd is nice.  /etc/hosts is beautifully simple.

The exact format depends on the purpose.  Configuring X resources is
very different from configuring host names.  So there's no single
"perfect" format, although I personally like YAML because it's flexible
enough to handle any reasonable data structure.

ER> And I should point out that lua can handle 'standard':

ER>     variable = value
ER>     variable = value

ER> syntax just fine. So you wouldn't even need to know it was lua in
ER> the simple case.

That would be great!  Unfortunately it's not the case today...

ER> I think you seriously overestimate the appeal of something like ion3 with
ER> the sort of people who would need such a simplified config file
ER> syntax.

Maybe I do.  I personally know 2 people that liked my tiling Ion3 setup
that were turned off by the Lua configurations.  That's a small sample
size for sure.  But I have written an article on Ion3 for IBM
developerWorks and the main complaint I got from readers was about the
configuration syntax (8 e-mails).

ER> And I might very well consider attempting a simplified syntax parsing
ER> script. Though seeing as how I have been comfortably using the lua
ER> configuration stuff for a long time now I am not at all sure I am going to
ER> be able to come up with useful 'names' for things people want to do.

Cool, I'll be glad to help any way I can.

Ted