On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 04:10:59AM -0600, Dale wrote: > +1 I do OK with plain text but no clue on the new xml stuff. Why not > just keep it simple? Is xml REALLY needed?
XML is handy for nested configuration, where various options apply to specific subsets of other configuration items. I could count on one hand the number of times that has actually been the case for any real world program I have worked on. If you use "key:value" lines, the parsing is so simple that you don't need any outside package, but you still have to clean up lines to remove comments, skip empty lines, and merge consecutive lines -- a few extra lines of code, not enough to even put into a library, let alone turn into a full-blown package. But parsing XML is too much work to reinvent each time, so people write complete parsing packages for it. From the purely programming point of view, those packages are simpler to use than rolling your own for 5 lines, and thus they use them everywhere. Then they think of all sorts of ungodly configuration tricks suddenly made possible, throw them in just because they can, and the poor user gets stuck with the mess. -- ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._. Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / fe...@crowfix.com GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E 6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933 I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o