Re: gnome-db 0.2 is ready

[Daniel Veillard <Daniel Veillard w3 org>]

> >should extend programs, so I think it would be nice. It's a good thing to
> keep the
> >number of different file-formats used by GNOME as low as possible.
> Why not use XML? We could make a DTD for configuration files that could be
> generic enough.
> We could have things like:
> 
>     <config-entry name="default directory" value="~/.bogusdir" />

  Shouldn't be a problem,

> Plus, with XML, you don't have to build a new config file parser each time,
> just reuse the
> one in libxml. We could also have some sorts of callbacks registered to the
> XML parser
> so that it can take actions when it's doing its parsing (such as setting the
> value of a variable)...

  The library can do two kind of parsing now:
    - either build a tree representing the nodes of the document
      (e.g. config-name) carrying their attribute/value pairs
      having a bit of depth also help structuring the information.
    - a SAX like interface with callbacks on element parsing, text parsing
      etc, this allow to parse very big documents without huge
      memory requirement ...
 But I would rather keep a separate configuration document per application
to avoid one centralized location (Oops did I said registry ? ... no I will
survive:-)

> Maybe we could elaborate on this, so that every Gnome app uses this to store
> its configuration, and yet
> they would all use the XML component the same way, without having to have a
> dedicated one for each of them
> (only a specific set of callbacks).

  one possibility is to integrate the parser in a daemon program and 
have it comminicate with the application using Corba (Orbit). That avoid
duplicating the functionnality and allow extra handling due to the centralized
execution.

> PS: Then i'm sure the SGML/XML gurus will tell us about whether to store
> 'values' (such as '~/.bogusdir') in
> attributes or in tag content...

  For a filename (why a filename b.t.w. value="http://myhome/config" :-)
I guess that having in attributes is no problem, this is equvalent ...

Daniel

P.S. the xml-gnome code is terribly outdated, but I'm busy on other things
   too I will commit soon (I'm saying that for 2 weeks I guess !). BTW
   does someone whant to build  a gnome interface for rpmfind ?
   http://rufus.w3.org/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html

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