Re: Possible WM Documentation Project

cga wrote:
> Peter Dembinski wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 10:50:35AM -0800, Alex Perez wrote:
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>  
>>
>>>> I should have read the previous post more carefully.  All my 
>>>> divagations
>>>> were about switching from proplist format to XML-based format of 
>>>> configuration files.      
>>>
>>> Perhaps /I/ am the one who misunderstood the previous post, because I 
>>> thought it was about *documentation*. Was I incorrect?
>>>   
>>
>>
>> heh :)
>>
>> That's my opinion:
>> .  DocBook is good for technical documentation,
>> .  PropLists are good for storing configuration info.
>>
>> [...]
>>  
>>
> 
> What I had in mind - perhaps mistakenly - was that configuration files 
> in the oss world were gradually being converted to some standard 
> xml-based dialect(s).

No, this is absolutely false, IMHO.

> 
> Here's what happened to me when I installed Debian Sarge with the wmaker 
> cherry on top: started wprefs to add a couple of favorites to my menus 
> and wprefs said - oh no you don't..! your menu files (read conf file) 
> are in the *wrong* format.. So I poke around a bit and eventually I find 
> that wmakerconf is not so fussy and lets you convert you menu files to 
> the "other" format.. But then guess what.. you lose the Debian menu 
> (yes.. the one that's regularly updated each time you use the Debian 
> packaging system to add or remove apps from the system..!).
> So apparently just for wmaker there's not one but at least two different 
> proprietory formats just for the menus..

You have a fairly large misunderstanding of the problem with the two 
formats. They are both plist based formats. The error you are referring 
to is a result of (I think) the transition to UTF8 (Unicode) format 
plist files, which is an encoding issue, and not any change in the 
actual plist spec or anything silly like that. Does this make a bit more 
sense now?

XML is not easily human-readable. It wasn't designed to be. INI files 
and plist files, on the other hand, were designed to be. XML is also 
over-used and abused, put to work doing things it was never designed to 
do nor very well suited to do. Parsing plist files is amazingly simple. 
parsing XML is not, and requires large libraries and unnecessary 
dependencies.

> I'm not saying xml is necessarily the solution to the wild variety of 
> formats of conf files in the linux (*nix?) world.. but since gnome/gtk 
> appear to have converted to this new standard - at least from what I see 
> when I grep the /etc directory on this new system - I thought I'd ask..

Since when has GNOME/GTK become the authority on the best configuration 
file format? IMHO, the effort required to transition to an XML based 
config file format far outweights any benefits (which may or may not 
even exist). Simply stated, the pay off is not worth the investment in 
time and effort.
> 
> As to Docbook .. we're all agreed.. No questions asked :-)
Glad to hear it. It's an excellent format.

> oh and what's Proplists/libproplist? couldn't find a wiki.. couldn't 
> find any doc on any of my systems either..?

plist/proplists are the  format of the config file in windowmaker. They 
were originally (AFAIK) devised by NeXT, and used by GNUstep also. To a 
limited extent, they are still used by Apple, but they have moved to a 
(really gross, IMHO) XML-based plist format which is laughably unreadable.

Cheers,
Alex Perez

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