RE: config library. Was GNOME registry

[Rene Mayrhofer <rmayr vianova at>]

At 09:34 02.01.99 +0100, Rowan van der Molen wrote:
>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
Wonderful
Maybe we should try to get an own mailing list to.

>>> >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 like the idea of using XML for a text file storage.

>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. 
I know that most people won't like this, but I think such a tool would be
(in a way) similiar to the Windows regedit. That would make it easy for
Windows sysadmins.
But the big advantage of XML config files would be that you do not NEED to
use the tool. That is something I always hated about the Windows registry.

>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outdated 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.
Exactly.

>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 ;-)
Would be nice.

>I like abstraction
I like abstraction too.
I think that we could provide a very high level of abstraction to the
programmer because speed is not important. The only disadvantage of
abstraction is speed. 

A central configuration library would be a big step for the UNIX world.