From kde-core-devel  Tue Dec 07 18:44:54 2004
From: Frans Englich <frans.englich () telia ! com>
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 18:44:54 +0000
To: kde-core-devel
Subject: Re: XML/XSD based configuration files.
Message-Id: <200412071844.54821.frans.englich () telia ! com>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=110244468601923

On Tuesday 07 December 2004 18:16, Aaron Seigo wrote:
> On December 7, 2004 9:49, George Staikos wrote:
> > On Tuesday 07 December 2004 11:45, Frans Englich wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 07 December 2004 14:47, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> > > > From the buzzword-department.
> > > >
> > > > See http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94611
>
> there are a few separate issues here:
>
> 0) default configuration file format
>
> besides speed gained by the simplicity of the .ini format, it's a very
> human friendly format. people can easily find and change settings as
> needed. XML is not nearly as human friendly, and i think that's an
> important thing to keep in mind as well.

I would consider that such a low priority it can be neglectable; that people 
need to manually hack files is the bug, not that it's difficult. Whatever if 
you, me or some other hacker find it a little bit cumbersome. If a future 
format must take into account hand editing of the format, then we're 
compromising for usage scenarios which are going in the wrong direction(if 
it's a side-effect, then it's nice plus of course).

<snip>
> xml does make sense for a lot of situations, but outside of very simple
> usage it's a PITA to work with programmatically and opaque for users to
> deal with. 

Indeed. XPath is the word, AFAIK. That's generic, and basically what one 
invent in a half-baked way when manually navigating a DOM tree. I don't know 
of any other (generic) solution.

What I think this discussion misses, is a perspective on the cross-desktop 
configuration frameworks; there was noise about that some time ago. When a 
large change in this is done, it could be a good opportunity to solve one of 
those integration issues(although an abstracted back end makes it a lot 
easier).


Cheers,

		Frans