On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 23:20:37 +0100 "Joe Desbonnet" <jdesbonnet@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. Sure, or freedesktop.org, freestandards.org etc.. But really all that is needed is a defacto standard based on a prevalent solution. So talking about it and trying to form a committee etc. is likely the long way to a solution. > 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. No doubt. > 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). The backend used to store the configuration database isn't really all that important once you have a standard API which can be used by applications and CLI/GUI config editors. > To ease migration, adapter modules could be written to dynamically > translate existing config files to/from the new format. Yup, and the package Shane mentioned (Elektra) has this. > 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. I don't think this will actually be a huge step forward or make the difference to anyone deciding whether to embrace Linux or not. But there's no doubt it would be at least nice incremental improvement. Sean -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
