On Thu, 2 Aug 2007 21:50:24 -0400 Etan Reisner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
ER> On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 05:28:05PM -0400, Ted Zlatanov wrote: >> On Thu, 2 Aug 2007 16:57:08 -0400 Etan Reisner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> ER> Also, the fact that the bindings are in lua is unrelated to the ER> difficulty in editing them for normal people, lua is designed to be ER> used for configuration services and as such can be made to look ER> rather config-file-like. >> >> IMO Lua is not a good configuration language no matter what. Neither >> are Perl, shell, etc. When the author punts the software configurations >> to code, either the users learn to code that language, or they walk >> away. If you have a better Lua syntax, that's great, but remember it >> has to be better than a regular configuration file too, because that's >> what end users expect. ER> What is a 'regular configuration file'? INI syntax? resolv.conf syntax? ER> xorg.conf syntax? xml? What 'standard' configuration files do users deal ER> with at this point? (Or really ever?) Excellent question :) Unix users expect readable configurations without code. sendmail.cf is horrible. /etc/passwd is nice. /etc/hosts is beautifully simple. The exact format depends on the purpose. Configuring X resources is very different from configuring host names. So there's no single "perfect" format, although I personally like YAML because it's flexible enough to handle any reasonable data structure. ER> And I should point out that lua can handle 'standard': ER> variable = value ER> variable = value ER> syntax just fine. So you wouldn't even need to know it was lua in ER> the simple case. That would be great! Unfortunately it's not the case today... ER> I think you seriously overestimate the appeal of something like ion3 with ER> the sort of people who would need such a simplified config file ER> syntax. Maybe I do. I personally know 2 people that liked my tiling Ion3 setup that were turned off by the Lua configurations. That's a small sample size for sure. But I have written an article on Ion3 for IBM developerWorks and the main complaint I got from readers was about the configuration syntax (8 e-mails). ER> And I might very well consider attempting a simplified syntax parsing ER> script. Though seeing as how I have been comfortably using the lua ER> configuration stuff for a long time now I am not at all sure I am going to ER> be able to come up with useful 'names' for things people want to do. Cool, I'll be glad to help any way I can. Ted
