a little (folish?) idea

[Weapon of Mass Deduction]

For some reason my last replies didn't come through...

Weapon of Mass Deduction wrote:

andy at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

blacklist wrote @ Mon, 25 Oct 2004 04:02:47 +0200:


Why not, once DragonFly will create its own ports-system, store the 
port-files in XML? At least for the ports, this is quite reasonable.
This could also be applied to the whole system configuration-file 
concept, but I can figure not everyone would like to see a XML-parser
included in the base system... :P


XML is neither very good for humans to process nor for computers.
Why would that be? One who understands HTML would certainly understand
XML, and is it not true that, for example, many people are ardently 
hand-coding their webpages? Aren't there also many XML-editors available
to make life easier in case you really need it?
XML has been universally accepted, and its succes grows day by day.
Now I don't see what your point is, so I think you would better state
some facts before jumping to conclusions.

YAML is better for humans,
Concluding from the example at its website, I don't see a major 
improvement. Also, realize XML on its own isn't intented to be 
human-readable, that's where XSLT comes in. As a matter of fact,
it would even be possible to have the raw XML-files be transformed
to YAML, if that would really that human-readable.

 S-lang (lisp) is better for cumputers, e.g.

So even if there was a problem, XML would not be the solution
(unless your intention is to sell us software tools or hardware).
Erm.. *my* intention to sell *you* (plural) software/hardware?

I cannot not see any sign pointing in that direction.
And, to the point, noone says there is any problem. If the existence
of a serious problem would be required for anything to be improved,
the development of DragonFly BSD should be halted immediately...
Still, there are many benefits of XML over plain-text configuration
storage. For example, it would enable one to centralize settings as
much as possible, express the relation between the separate 
configuration files, administer and process configuration settings 
more effectively, and display the contents in a more elegant
(or 'human-readable' ;)) and sensible form then the one which is 
produced by just printing a text-dump in the console.

Andy