I think the only way this will happen is for a consortium of interests in the Linux (and similar OSes) world to come up with a formal standard (file format, best practices and API bindings for common languages). Then cast it in concrete by submitting it to a standards body eg EMCA. If the standard is good then I believe people will use it. Parsing config files is tedious and error prone. Often developers forget about things like international characters and have to change the format after a few releases. At it's simplest this standard could be a simple name-value pair text file. But it should also cater for complex configurations and allow a schema to define and describe the file (and perhaps the GUI used to edit it). To ease migration, adapter modules could be written to dynamically translate existing config files to/from the new format. This would be a huge step forward for Linux. Right now the /etc directory is littered with different formats. Many are not documented outside of the source coded used to read them. Joe. On 3/27/06, Shane Stixrud <shane@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, sean wrote: > > > GUI users don't want to be hunting through text files anyway, they > > want nice settings windows and wizards. Anyone hand editing config > > files better know what's going on anyway; the current situation isn't too > > bad there. > > This is not a gui issue, nor is it just an "end user issue". This > attitude of "anyone hand editing config files better know what's going on > anyways" becomes largely invalid when a standard methodology exists. > > > > > gconf already provides a reasonable way to change settings from the > > command line and via GUI tools. What would you change? > > Gconf shows the gnome people realized early on having a standard > method for storing and modifying configuration data is important, to the > gnome platform... We are not talking about JUST the gnome platform and my > guess is gconf would not meet the needs of Fedora as a whole. > > > > > No matter what you come up with though, it will be many years before > > you see wide spread adoption. If anything, you might consider a > > project to create a system-wide config editor that knows all > > the different formats etc and provides a consistent CLI/GUI > > interface. > > Projects already exist http://www.libelektra.org/Main_Page for example. > The problem is not that code doesn't exist, the problem is one of getting > everyone to: > a) agree its desirable > b) Agreeing/creating an implementation > c) having a plan for getting where we want to be "many years" later. > > I don't see how a few people can make this happen, it is going to take > some serious influence to make any real world progress. > > -- > fedora-devel-list mailing list > fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list > -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
