Repository feature proposal

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le dim 19/10/2003 à 17:45, seth vidal a écrit :
> > Really the on-disk format should be an xml file per repository in a
> > foo.d directory that is scanned by the package manager on startup.
> > 
> > Life is so much easier when you don't have to share a single file.
> 
> There is work going on in the development branch of yum to allow for a
> dir like this. We're using configparser format instead of xml b/c it
> makes the config files very easy for humans to grok, I have a few
> problems using xml for a config file that people need to edit b/c I've
> found xml config files tend to confuse users. xml for data that a
> program has to use/parse is excellent but while xml IS human editable
> it's not always trivially so.

Sure - however xml is getting more prevalent and even if it's not the
easiest format to grok for a human it's always easier than learn
yet-another-config-file format.

(speaking from experience I was severilly disoriented when I first
discovered the xml files tomcat uses - it was not "the apache way". Now
I'd kill to get apache xml-ize it's format)

Really if one doesn't forget to put comments in the file, use strict dtd
checks so the app can tell on startup what errors were made, does not
forget to indent properly its file and uses a logical namespace xml can
be a joy to read. People do forget xml "verbosity" is here to help human
readers.

fontconfig & tomcat are great examples of readable xml. gconf stuff OTOH
shows what one can get when people use xml like some sort of primal soup
(kind of strange when one of the goals of gconf was to avoid opaque
binary formats).

Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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