Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 04:10:59AM -0600, Dale wrote:
> +1  I do OK with plain text but no clue on the new xml stuff.  Why not
> just keep it simple?  Is xml REALLY needed?

XML is handy for nested configuration, where various options apply to
specific subsets of other configuration items.  I could count on one
hand the number of times that has actually been the case for any real
world program I have worked on.  If you use "key:value" lines, the
parsing is so simple that you don't need any outside package, but you
still have to clean up lines to remove comments, skip empty lines, and
merge consecutive lines -- a few extra lines of code, not enough to
even put into a library, let alone turn into a full-blown package.
But parsing XML is too much work to reinvent each time, so people
write complete parsing packages for it.  From the purely programming
point of view, those packages are simpler to use than rolling your own
for 5 lines, and thus they use them everywhere.  Then they think of
all sorts of ungodly configuration tricks suddenly made possible,
throw them in just because they can, and the poor user gets stuck with
the mess.

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