Re: Binary configuration files as panacea to whatever ails Linux(was: Re: the problem with LINUX)

[Evgeny Stambulchik]

Nadav Har'El wrote:

Of course, you need a bidirectional mapping (i.e. not only from the
disk representation to the in-memory representation, but also vice-
versa); Otherwise, the changes can't be translated to rules of
configuration files.

Right, and the lack of these features (actually, the lack of decent API
providing them) distracted many even pure-X apps from solely using it; instead,
they load/store their configs from customly-formatted .rc files.

This is not the only problem with X resources...

Sure. But my point is that even such a limited config interface has never existed at the base level of Unix system. A limited tool is better than no tool at all. Just imagine how many thousands of hours of programming/debugging could be saved if in libc (or in a separate lib - like libm for math stuff) there existed a simplistic API for dealing with INI-style config files! INI config files would be completely adequate for a vast majority of existing apps, including those that don't presently provide a configuration mechanism at all (e.g. why should I worry about aliasing cp to "cp -i", ls to "ls -F --color=auto" etc in each and every shell separately instead of setting it in a fileutils config file, once and for ever?!).

I need the well-defined API and its C implementation. Whatever

The Xt implementation of X resources was quite well-defined and powerful.

Not really. Why then literally no app uses Xresources for _storing_ prefs? Netscape's preferences.js would fit nicely into the Xresources syntax, for example. Some other advanced X apps (e.g. Nedit) started using the Xresources for preferences but then switched to a custom load/store API _although the format remained the same_! But again, you missed my point. Whatever nice or powerful it is, it's bound to X. Would anybody in the sane mind want to link crond or named to X libs (and which wouldn't work without opening a $DISPLAY)?

There was a program called xresedit (or something like that... hmm, could it
be that XFree86 dropped this??)

editres. BTW, it always had misc problems with Motif/Lesstif apps (which became very severe with Motif-2.1 API, so that OpenMotif folks started putting a modified version of (parts of?) libXmu inside libXm - which created a bunch of other problems, but that's a completely different story).

Regards,

Evgeny


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