On Thu, 2010-06-24 at 12:23 +0200, Jesper Dahl Nyerup wrote: > On Jun 24 11:09, Rainer Gerhards wrote: > > Did you also have a look at David's proposal? I guess it got lost in the > > vast amount of mail. I have uploaded it to > > > > http://www.rsyslog.com/download/david_rsyslog.conf > > > > I think this problem is actually human readable and writable. > > > > What do you think? > > I actually read David's proposal just after i sent my message, and > there's no doubt that this example looks nicer. But that doesn't change > my opinion on what XML should be used for, and what it shouldn't. > > I think XML is a great format for simple, diplomatic RPC-mechanisms > between systems that need a common understanding of what's valid data > and what isn't. I think it's great for my XMPP client talking to my XMPP > server, and I even think it's great for representing web pages. > > What I don't think XML should be used for, is mainly being edited by > people (me, anyway) on systems that doesn't provide an editing > functionality that aids the user sufficiently in regards to format, > semantics as well as the actual content. > > If some package maintainer from one of the systems I use, decides to > create a tool to automatically configure rsyslog, and this tool decides > to omit most whitespaces from its generated output, as this is valid > XML, the result would be unusable, at best. > > I know this scenario may be a bit emphasised, and certainly wouln't > happen upstream, but the downsides of XML, being a markup language > suitable for automatic interaction, makes it unfit for the purpose of > config files. > > This is why I would prefer a format that by design and specification > enforces read- and writability.
I have no experience with YAML. Will dig into it. But before I spent lots of time there, could you do a quick rewrite of the config in YAML? I'd like to grasp of how it looks, especially when applied to rsyslog concepts (some things looked really nice, but only as long as they do not need to express rsyslog configs ;)). Thanks, Rainer _______________________________________________ rsyslog mailing list http://lists.adiscon.net/mailman/listinfo/rsyslog http://www.rsyslog.com
