RE: config library. Was GNOME registry

[Rowan van der Molen <bigsmoke usa net>]

At 12:35 1-01-99 -0800, you wrote:
>I have put up a page.
><http://www.thestuff.net/libcfg>http://www.thestuff.net/libcfg
>
>On Sat, 2 Jan 1999, Rowan van der Molen wrote:
>
>> At 17:40 1-01-99 +0100, you wrote:
>> >At 09:20 31.12.98 -0800, you wrote:
>> >>I think you misunderstand. Thats what I tryed to say.
>> >>
>> >>The only reason the actual file exists on the hard drive is so the
library
>> >>can tell what method of saving the config data. The program dosnt do it.
The
>> >>library does. PAM does the same thing.
>> >>
>> >>The program should have no idea what form the data is being saved in,
just
>> >>that it is actually being saved.
>> >
>> >I think that would be the best solution. But the problem is that most
(all)
>> >of the programs would have to be converted to use the library. If only few
>> >programs used the central registry, it wouldn't be of much use. Therefore
>> >the API should make the conversion easy. Unfortunately I have no idea how
>> >this could be done because every config file has it's own format.
>> >Such a library would be wonderful if all programs used it. It is very
>> >important that the library should offer the possibility to store the data
>> >in text files (maybe with an appropriate directory structure).
>> At this point my little XML idea might come in handy or won't it?
>> 
>I find the XML idea a good idea. I do alot of html coding, so it would be
>nice to use tags. :)

Ok, I'll explain my idea some further

I think that you might very easily make a program which puts a nice lay-out
on your screen in which you can change your XML config files which can
than be converted to the appropriate plain text config files through XSL or
made
available through a nice CORBA or library api.

If we use XML for our config files it might be very easy to make a nice
configuration
manager by just making it an XML/XSL frond-end. 
That would mean that you don't have to bother how the config program is put 
on the screen of the end-user. You could make that extremely configurable
through
XSL or something alike. Even better: you can very easilly make a console
program
as well with a special set of stylesheet rules.

I think that you simply can't program a GUI configuration program for every
single
program which appears and even if you would succeed with that, it would be
outdated 
and old-fashioned before it's even downloaded.

Instead of that you can simply declare the rules for writing config files for
the program 
and the program (XSL processor) can wirte the config files for you. 

This way you could even go so far that the end-user doesn't even need to know
what 
programs he's running under the shell of his beautifull configuration
program. 
He sets the background and the background changes but he doesn't even need to
know
what WM he's running because the program writes the appropriate config file
for
it ;-)

I like abstraction