Re: sysinst split project - The Configuration File

Jason Thorpe wrote:
> On Dec 14, 2009, at 11:24 PM, David Holland wrote:
> 
>>  3. Configuration should be done in a concise and legible format,
>> such as key/value pairs, nested key/value pairs, columnar tables, or
>> whatever. Since XML is content-free^W^W just syntax, any such sane
>> format can easily be represented as XML. (As long as the data remains
>> strictly hierarchical and isn't, say, graph-structured. But that's not
>> likely to be a problem here.)
> 
> Right.  I tend to favor property lists for this ... but the prevalent format for those in modern times are the XML flavor.

I just thought I'd throw in my 2c as a user. I use XML quite a bit for 
exchanging data between our database and another remote system. For that 
application it seems acceptable but for a system installer it seems a 
bit of overkill.

Fair enough if the raw XML is hidden from the user but then there is 
still the maintenance of the DTD and additional processing overhead. The 
DTD is the only thing that makes it universally understandable and only 
to the internals that will process the configuration, and for the most 
part I'd imagine the config would stay quite static. I'm not sure I see 
where the data exchange standards debate actually comes in.

As the epitome of a user, it makes sense to me to have a config that is 
interpreted/parsed by the builtin scripting language, whatever that may be.

I use lua on OpenWRT and I can't say I object to it's use. Surely the 
config could be abstract and still maintain a processing overhead lower 
than XML?

Sarton