configuration files

[Richard Coleman]

My guess is something of this nature will never happen within the 
confines of current BSD projects.  You would never get enough people to 
agree on the details, and the resulting bikeshed discussion would be 
legendary.  This is not a slam on any current project.  Such a change 
would be very disruptive with very little short term gain (most of the 
gains would be long term).

Some of the special purpose forks (such as monowall) have done such 
things in order to facilitate using web interfaces, etc.  It's easier 
here, since these are "closed" systems.

The best way to achieve such a re-architecting of /etc is with a new 
project/fork that has this as a primary goal.  I'm sure this will happen 
eventually.

Richard Coleman
Richard.Coleman at xxxxxxxxxx
James Frazer wrote:
Just a hypothetical question I've been pondering lately:

I'm just wondering what the future holds for configuration files found 
in /etc (or wherever for that matter) ?  Are we ever going to see a 
shift towards an XML based config-system?  Or is the general consensus 
that 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' ?

I know there's a lot of merit/legacy in the standard *nix way of doing 
config files, but it seems kind of logical that an XML based 
config-system would be the next step.  It's still text based, and 
therefore can be edited by hand (if necessary), but it can also be 
validated to ensure correctness (in structure & syntax).