Danny van Dyk wrote:
IMHO a text based file has a big advantage in this proposed application over fileformats which use XML: Any administrator can read it with his editor of choice, right from the console.
This is an important aspect for sure, but why can't such file be generated from a marked up one? Because the same message will be put in multiple forms (ideally) it is best to have a version with all the required meta-data to generate all the other formats, because if you have to add such meta-data it's usually much worse (= manual or conditional human work).
Some people like reading console messages, others plain text mail messages, others want html marked up mail messages, other others like reading an rss-feed, and of course there are people that like to read the full fledged funky marked up with all hyperlinks possible html version on the web. I think the only real importance is that all representations can easily be generated from the original source, be that XML, reStructuredText or any other format.
With regard to being it hard to write or not, I think these kind of messages are very well suited for templates, so it is just a matter of filling in the message, which should make the underlying format not so important.
Just my €0.02 on the XML vs. plain text discussion. -- Fabian Groffen -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
