Bart Smaalders writes: > You mean like gnome's configuration info? An excellent example, I think. See CR 4808196.
> Configuration info needs to be owned by the app and edited by > the app, I think. That certainly reduces the number of accurate parsers needed, but it likely increases the difficulty of upgrade. In order to upgrade, you need an application that can run on the oldest system to be upgraded (as well as the current one) and parse the oldest version of the configuration file. One of the attractions of plain old text files is that the upgrade process can trust that basic text tools such as awk are present and can run a script that we design in the future to manage that transition. If we're talking about compiled applications instead of scripts, we need to be compiling those _new_ applications on the oldest systems we support so that the binaries that perform the upgrade actions will run on the systems we want to upgrade, and thus just forget about using new OS features. (Or, alternatively, we just abandon the concept of LU.) TANSTAAFL. -- James Carlson, KISS Network <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
