XML/XSD based configuration files.

[Aaron Seigo]

On December 7, 2004 9:49, George Staikos wrote:
> On Tuesday 07 December 2004 11:45, Frans Englich wrote:
> > On Tuesday 07 December 2004 14:47, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> > > From the buzzword-department.
> > >
> > > See http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94611

there are a few separate issues here:

0) default configuration file format

besides speed gained by the simplicity of the .ini format, it's a very human 
friendly format. people can easily find and change settings as needed. XML is 
not nearly as human friendly, and i think that's an important thing to keep 
in mind as well. 

1) multiple backends

cool idea, esp useful for configurations that live on the network. i think the 
XML backend is of limited use compared to a DB based backed, but the big 
issue here will be migrating between back ends, which is where this could be 
important:

2) configuration server

this was brought up, and while i think it's probably a good idea i really just 
hope that it is self-maintaining, by which i mean that whenever its needed 
it's loaded. the biggest problem with configuration servers is making sure 
they are running when needed, especially when the application is run outside 
of its native desktop.

beyond that, having a config server would make moving between formats 
(including things like client-side caching into .ini's of network'd configs 
(think LDAP or RDBMS)) possible without being a nightmare.

3) application data storage

if you read the linked bug report, the person is actually talking about 
application DATA, not really configuration. look at the set of the files they 
use as examples: all live in $KDEHOME/share/apps

xml does make sense for a lot of situations, but outside of very simple usage 
it's a PITA to work with programmatically and opaque for users to deal with. 
how many people here hand-hack .ui files? there's very few, and it's at least 
in part because it's XML which is not a very human friendly format.

that said, it would be very nice to have something for KDE4 that makes 
programmatic access of xml from kde apps pleasant and encourage usage of that 
for data storage where appropriate, similar (though not exactly the same) as 
we do with KConfig for configuration files and iconthemes for icons.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
Society is Geometric
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