On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 22:57:13 +0100 Jan Kundrát <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | On Tuesday 01 of November 2005 19:25 Ciaran McCreesh wrote: | > On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 17:22:29 +0100 Jan Kundrát <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | > wrote: | > | What's wrong with XML format similar to the one that is used for | > | our GLSAs? | > | > 1. Portage does not handle XML. Portage will not handle XML in the | > near future. | | How will it handle GLSAs then? [1]
gentoolkit != portage. | > 5. XML is merely adding another problem to the one we have already. | | Could you please explain? Parsing XML is complicated. Writing XML is complicated. I put together a complete working client that can show news items in the plain text format proposed -- it took me fifteen minutes to write. I threw together a script which can be called after a cron sync that mails news items to root in under a minute. There is no way this could be done if XML were being used -- any task involving news items would be a major chore. | > There is no XML in this GLEP for the same reasons that there is no | > Java, CORBA, EJBs, web services, on demand computing initiatives or | > invisible pink unicorns. | | I'm not sure if our GLSAs use PHP, ODBC, ASP, SOAP, computer grids or | invisible pink unicorns while I'm pretty sure they do use XML. And? Why repeat previous mistakes? | > I have an eselect module which can read these news files. The whole | > thing is about the same size as the DTD would need to be for an | > XML-based solution. I have a parser written for the format in | > question. The whole thing is smaller than the initialisation code | > for an off the shelf XML parser. | | Great. Why haven't you just used existing code from `glsa-check`, BTW? Because merely figuring out the XML DTD takes longer than it does to write an entire client for plain text news items. | > It's not a question of "what's wrong with XML?". It's a question of | > "what advantage would we gain by strapping a giant flapping wet | > kipper to a bicycle?". | | Or (a little bit rephrased) "why should we stick with consistent file | formats". Uh, you'd have to invent a load of new XML DTD stuff for this anyway. So you're not using a consistent file format at all, you're just using a consistent unnecessary layer in the middle, which as a side effect makes your files incompatible with every standard Unix tool ever written. Using XML does not magically make things compatible. XML is just a layer in the middle. Any tool processing XML files still has to worry about however the DTD in question works. You think XML magically makes things compatible? Then I suggest you write a GuieXML to Docbook conversion tool, and see how many thousand lines of XSLT it takes. All XML does is move the conversion and parsing problems to a different, more complex level. -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron) Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm
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