Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> philipp@??? said:
> > How about standard ini format?
>
> No, please not that.
>
> If you want to go for that sort of organization then going for a
> complete parser would seem better - going basically bind 8/9 like
<Head starts to swirl> No, no, no... this is horrible. Look at it...
> main {
>
> }
Are you sure you don't want a #include above that? :-)
> transports {
> smtp {
> # smtp defs
> }
> }
Ewwwww....
I have to say that the existing format is not really broken. It's human-readable
however the order of sections could perhaps do with a slight rearrangment - this
is what ph was originally talking about. Bringing in this schema I think would
be to do away with something that is rare in modern software - sensible config
files.
> I quite like the idea of bracketing sections - makes it possible to use
> syntax sensitive editors and do fast checks on things. However the ini
> format does not support that at all.
but you are proposing a system that means a parse would fail for the lack of a
closing curly bracket. When you are ssh'ed into your mail server from 60 miles
away, mail is down and you have nothing more than vi, you'll be glad that you
don't need { and } everywhere. Trust me.
If a new config file format was introduced that used these braces, I suspect I
would create a meta-language and a parser to produce them for me automatically
to stay on the safe side. Perhaps an M4 file? :-) (Are you starting to see my
point yet? :-)
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| Paul Robinson - Technical Director @ Akitanet - http://www.akita.co.uk |
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