On 23 Feb 2014, at 18:11, Allan Jude <free...@allanjude.com> wrote:

> sysrc solves this nicely, it is in base now, and is great for
> programmatically adding, removing and changing lines in rc.conf style
> files. It is also in ports for older versions of FreeBSD where it is not
> in base.

The problem is, there is no such thing as an rc.conf style file.  rc.conf is 
just a shell script.  If you only edit it with sysrc, or you are careful to 
preserve the structure, then it's fine.  There is absolutely nothing stopping 
you, however, from writing arbitrarily complex shell scripts inside rc.conf.  
Sure, it's a terrible idea to do so, but when has that ever stopped anyone?

An rc-replacement could enforce this by only accepting purely declarative files 
for configuration, guaranteeing that if they were syntactically valid they 
would also be machine editable, no matter what the user does to them.

David

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