On Mon, Jan 13, 2003, Ira Abramov wrote about "Re: New Free Software project anyone? (was: Re: Binary configuration files as panacea to whatever ails Linux ...)": > > An application will treat configuration information as an hash > > (associative array). > > and who takes care of the name space, and what if you need stanzas > (Apache and Samba come to mind)
The Unix approach (and to an even greater degree, the Plan9 approach) has always been to use the file system to supply name spaces. So you have ctwm's configuration in ~/.ctwmrc, zsh's configuration in ~/.zshrc, Mozilla's configuration in ~/.mozilla - no need for a central daemon that puts all these files together in one big (and easily corrupted, as Windows users know) "registry" or database. You could go even further with the filesystem-namespace paradigm, and make the different parts of a program's configuration (say, virtual servers and directories in Apache) to be separate configuration files and directories. The Reiserfs filesystem was designed exactly for (among other things) letting you to store tiny configuration files as files and directories, dropping the need for stuff like Windows' ".ini" files or registries, or even XML. > You need to support locking of several instances reading the same > configs, possibly a few writing too... and then it starts to look like a > database. The file system solves this problem too, letting you lock files or (in some Unix implementations) parts of files. -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Jan 13 2003, 10 Shevat 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Are you still here? The message is over. http://nadav.harel.org.il |Shoo! Go away! ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
