On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Perrin Harkins wrote:
> > my only concrete reason for preferring xml, other than that
> > it "feels" right ;), is that you get much better error
> > handling right out of the box, especially when you turn on
> > validation. that's something that would have to be
> > implemented as part of a perl-based config file processor.
>
> Can't you just do something like a require() wrapped in an eval{}?
>
> I'm not against an XML config, although I've always been happy with perl
> config files in the past. (I still want to see the layered config idea that
> was discussed earlier.) It may be that a CGI implementation would need to
> cache the data with Storable and stat the XML files to see if they've
> changed.
One thing to bear in mind is the size of an XML parser. XML::SAX::PurePerl
is running at about 2500 lines of code at the moment, which could be seen
as pretty heavyweight for a core component. Then again, it could be
considerably smaller than, say, a fully fledged mail API.
We may wish to consider either simple INI files (which is what I'm using
to bootstrap XML::SAX, see the perl-xml list for details), or something
like Ingy's XML-come-Data-Dumper-come-Python config files. I forget what
it's called right now (MinML?).
But having said that, I agree with the validation thing - but there aren't
many validating XML parsers in perl.
--
<Matt/>
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