RE: GNOME registry

[Rowan van der Molen <bigsmoke usa net>]

>It would be handy to be able to configure everything from one location.
>To this end, I would love to have something like a control-center capplet
>to configure them someday. But Apache, sendmail, and all the other
>programs we're used to using already have standard locations for storing
>their data and your chances of persuading the authors or maintainers of
>those to optionally store their data in the GNOME registry is 0% or very
>close. =)
>I think making requests such as these from GNOME is asking too much.
>However, making a GNOMEified configuration program or capplet or something
>would be cool. I don't know enough about either sendmail or Apache
>configuration to even be useful in helping something like that, but if you
>do I'm sure it would be appreciated by many.
>

Yeah, but the problem with this approach is that you have to code a 
capplet for "every single" program which you might want to configure 
through one general place. Once this is done, we will be years further
from now. 
I'm already playing with a much better idea for some time now.
What if we would use XML and XSL to actually write the config files
for every program. Everyone can learn XSL in very little time.

What we would win with this is that you can write the actual config-files
all in XML. 
Than you can convert everything to the actual (old-fashioned) config files
which are now still used by all programs. This way we could have both
the old config system and a totally new one (with a CORBA interface to an
XML database) living together. 
And if a programmer wants ... he can simply add support for this totally new,
shiny XML-api and enjoy the luxe of not having to think of his own
config-file-format.

Suggestions please ;-) I'm willing to work this out very detailed.