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DragonFly kernel List (threaded) for 2003-12
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Re: configuration files


To: James Frazer <jfrazer@xxxxxxxx>
From: Richard Coleman <Richard.Coleman@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:25:31 -0500

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@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).




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