Re: Canonical pushes upstart into user session - systemd developer complains
On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 05:00:14PM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2012-11-26 07:27:08 +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
> > Ever heard of
> > grep, sed, awk, ....
> > all these nice things that make your life happy.
>
> These tools are broken when dealing with multibyte characters.
No they're not.
> For instance, with:
>
> foo = aéb
>
> a "grep 'a.b' file" will find nothing in the C locale.
But it will in a UTF8 locale, or in an ISO-8859-1 locale, for instance.
In a C locale, the é character simply does not exist, so you can't enter
it. If you entered it in a UTF8 locale and then switched to a C locale
to try to parse it, that can't work. It'd be like if you said
<foo<bar</foo<, and then complained to the author of your XML parser
that it doesn't understand what's going on.
> > No please - I don't mind the key = value in group config format, that
> > is readable, usefull, easy to edit.
>
> I disagree about "readable", except on small files. For instance,
> in the default .subversion/config file, the group names are lost
> among the comments.
The default .subversion/config file is a piece of documentation, not a
configuration file. I agree that there's far too much noise in there.
However, that's not a flaw of the format, it's a flaw of the subversion
default config file.
> And this format is also easy to break without noticing the breakage.
That claim is true for any structured file format, including XML.
> > Everything but XML. *EVERYTHING*.
>
> This is your opinion. I disagree. XML is nice for things like
> validation and complex operations. XML is easy (easier) to edit
> if you use the "right" tools.
XML is great for the things it was made for, but it's not a very useful
configuration file format. XML requires far too much noise to be put in
the config file for that.
In addition, your implicit claim that it's difficult to validate
ini-style configuration files, or to do complex operations on them, is
just false. There are plenty of libraries to parse .ini files, too, for
instance.
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