Re: Use of XML for config files

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

Volkert Barr <barr@cs.tu-berlin.de> wrote in message news:<3CFC5DB2.A21DCF61@cs.tu-berlin.de>...

> the Configuration Packages! If there is a consensus that XML is needed,
> the Spitbowl Package must be ported! 

I don't think this would be nessecary or a good idea. Making our own
Configuration XML parser is not out of the question. Parsing any XML
language that anyone could ever come up with is a very different task
than parsing a specific XML language. Making an XML parser customised
to the configuration XML language (whatever that would end up being)
may be more work than using ACT's XML reader, but it wouldn't be an
undoable effort.

We really only need to make the package *spec*s portable Ada. It would
be nice to have a portable reference implementation too, but its not
an absolute nessecity to have one, as long as its *possible* to make
one.

However, I agree with you that its probably more work than the task
requires. I think it would be silly to use XML, unless we are getting
something out of it that we can't easily get out of other grammars. PR
is *not* a sufficient answer. :-)

What that means is that if we were to use XML, we should support both
user-defined configuration item attributes and some kind of object
nesting (configuration items defined within other configuration
items). I haven't really heard anyone seriously arguing the usefulness
of this stuff.

If we are to stick with simple attribute-value pairs, then XML would
be major overkill.

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