Re: a little (folish?) idea

[Weapon of Mass Deduction <blacklist@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Martin P. Hellwig wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> Now that this group is created I can post the less df'ish stuff...
> I've had an idea, probably unrealistic and maybe just plain stupid but I 
> still like your opinion on it because I'm not talented enough to learn 
> good C (let alone good math) in a reasonable time so that I get to code 
> it myself , please don't mistake me for the “visionary type of guy”. I 
> can assure you that I'm not,  I even  feel kinda handicapped not to be 
> able to code this stuff together myself to prove my hypotheses.
> Well I hope this is enough disclaimer, now the actual subject  ;-)
>
> It sprang to my mind that almost all configuration / logging files are 
> “plain” text files ,in my opinion a big pro, text files are very 
> flexible stuff and easy handling.
>
> However on a daily bases I work (and learn about) SQL and  SQL db's.
> And in the way got charmed about the way it works .
>
> One sleepless night I wondered if it wouldn't be handy if I could create 
> a file which is ordinary in the sense that you can edit it with vi or 
> whatever tool of your choice, but behind the scene is actually a view on 
> a database.
> And I mean this quite literal in the sense that it's not like a cron job 
> which checks if the files are still the same, but more in the way of a 
> “server side” push.
> So that after the write on the edited file , the changes (after an 
> optional sanity check) are updated in the database.
> Other views change and so do the other “view-textfiles” who depend on 
> the same (shared) table/data.
>
> I could imagine that this would easer up multi-host configuration / 
> authentication / logging.
> You'll probably need to create a “textview” (a piece of text which 
> describes how the data would be placed (syntax) in the file) a dbview (a 
> plain database view) and optional sanity check for the input/output 
> to/from/via the textview / dbview.
> Well that would be the administrative tasks, the real challenge would be 
> to create a certain framework which makes this possible.
> But this is far away from my of expertise to see what the implication 
> would be on the OS to allow this. Perhaps these mechanism is already 
> used today but I'm unaware of it (I do know the /etc/(s)pwd.db structure 
> but this is not direct enough IMHO because it still depends on other 
> specialised tools like vipw and pwd_mkdb). Or even more probably this is 
> just a bunch of bs.
> But if you find the time please explain me why.
>
> Thanks for your time reading this.

I do not see what you mean with that database view. It would certainly 
be heavy-weight, that's clear. I think it would be *too* heavy -eight...
Well, I have a better idea...

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