Philip Brown wrote: > Patrick Grant wrote: > >> An increasing amount of code is distributed with the configuration in >> XML, which is used when people explicitly want to avoid doing that. >> >> Are there any plans to allow IPS to intelligently cope with XML files >> whilst avoiding the need for scripting? >> > > that's a bit disingenuous. At a certain level of depth, XML becomes "a > scripting language" in its own right. Its just kinda like the FPGA of > scripting languages :-}
I hate the way I agree with you so much! :) But my problem is that if a configuration system is managed well, it doesn't need scripting, and the inherent tree structure of XML *should* mean that a good package manager *should* be able to handle it elegantly. I am very frustrated we are encouraging people to move people to directory structures to govern their configs. Why? Because they're easy to manage. But these directory structures are trees... just like XML. I find it infuriating that the de facto configuration language is not a language that suits IPS. I find my self spending a lot of my days managing software written by clients, doing minimal amount of work to the configs, before putting them live. A simple example is changing database credentials. Other than these simple things I want the config files to be completely identical. Currently, I (ab)use debconf to hold these things and inject them into the relevant XML and don't support any local changes. I like that. Scripting should be considered harmful, but managing local configuration has to be done somehow. If I were to move the systems I manage to IPS, I'd need to find a new way to manage the configuration. I really need a way to say "these bits of the config file I'll let you do whatever with, these bits I need to customise". Are you not doing the same at the filesystem? What's the difference? I genuinely think IPS could do it better than anything out there if it had native XML support. I have ideas how this could be implemented, but Sun must have better XML guys than me! Is this genuinely not a common problem? Does noone else there really use a package manager to keep their configs in sync, with a small amount of local tweaks? I know I couldn't do my job without it. Patrick _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
