configuration files

[Dave Leimbach]

Richard Coleman <Richard.Coleman at xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> 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).

A long term gain might be a somewhat generic conf-system for
anything. With the knowledge of XSLT you can transform XML into other
forms.  I even had a little XSLT script that changed some XML data
into C++ objects at one point as a little side experiment.

That said if you can express the format of any configuration file,
even if it is *just* key-value pairs you could use a configurator tool
to try and make changes.  If the ending output is still the original
BSD configuration file then the people who don't want to make that
change don't have to.

Its an interesting idea as an add-on technology but I don't think it
needs to be tied into the system.


Dave