Admin tools - idea from left field

[David Welton <davidw@master.debian.org>]

I just wanted to toss this one out as sort of a random idea I had.

Basically, to isolate the config sections of various programs, and
utilize Tcl, Python, Guile, or something like that as a standard
config language, linking certain variables with the program's internal
variables.

This way, you would have a lot of programs that could be configured in
a similiar manner, with a 'real' programming language that would be
more or less the same for every app.  For instance, look at .muttrc:

set folder=~/mail
set record=+sent-mail
set nosave_name

Compare this with what it might look like in Tcl

set folder "~/mail"
set record "+sent-mail"
set nosave_name 1

Now, instead of writing a whole bunch of our own code, we can use a
nice, standard language to do our config file in...  This would also
make it very easy to write configurators, because instead of having to
recognize 132432 different, cruddy little mini-languages, you can just
deal with one, and deal with it well.

Obviously, this would be a large project, and might go nowhere at all.  

What do people think of the core idea, though?

-- 
David Welton                          http://www.efn.org/~davidw 

        Debian GNU/Linux - www.debian.org