On Tue, 6 Feb 2007, Roy Marples wrote:
> This email is about network configuration. Before I joined Gentoo,
> network configuration was done in bash arrays like so (note, that the
> variable name was changed in baselayout-1.11)
>
> ifconfig_eth0=(
> "10.1.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0"
> "10.1.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0"
> )
>
> This is all well and good, but only bash and zsh can use it.
That's not true. Only bash and zsh can *source* it. Aside from the fact
that most other shells don't have any way of storing the results of
reading such a file in an accessible way, that format is easy enough to
parse with a bit of sed.
> Who's got any bright ideas for a new config then? Lets brain storm!
If it's necessary to change at all, I'd vote for sections in square
brackets, applying to everything until the next square bracket, and lines
with a key, followed by a ':' or '=', followed by optional whitespace,
followed by any number of values, optionally in quotes with
backslash-escaped quotes and backslashes, separated by whitespace, with
the value lists for duplicate keys being concatenated.
It's not hard to parse (assuming, again, that you have some way to store
the results), users coming from Windows can write it as "ini" files, users
who like Java can write it as resource files, and old-school Unix types
can write RFC822 headers. And they're all mutually comprehensible if the
parser is just reasonably lenient.
-Daniel
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