: All the components initialized by Solr have an init(NamedList args) : initializer. This leads us to writing the configuration needed for the : component in the NamedList format. People familiar with Solr may know : the format but most of what is wrtten is noise than information. For : users who are not familiar w/ the format find it too difficult to : understand why they have to write it this way
while i don't disagree with you that it's not the most compact way to express the configuration, one of the main reasons for going this in route in the first place was so that (in theory) an XSD could be used to validate the structure of the solrconfig.xml, because the "variable" aspects of configuring plugins exists only as attribute values and text -- not as node names or attribute names (like with Map initialized plugins) there are still some other places in solrconfig.xml where the XML structure is variable (cache configs for one) but we (or at least: I) was trying to reduce that. -Hoss
