File format - what about XML? [was : Re: Geographic location in /etc]
On Thu, April 22 1999, "James M . Mastros" <james@rtweb.net> wrote:
|Because many hosts don't have control of their own DNS record. For that
|matter, many hosts don't have a DNS record accassable to them much of the
|time (IE are unconnected). It would probably be a Good Thing to store the
|location in RFC1876 format, though.
With all this talk about concentrating data to be shared by multiple
packages (location, hardware (gpm/X mouse), dotfile etc...), I keep
getting back to the idea of using XML files to describe all this
information.
The way this can be done is for Debian to define some generic
"Registry" like DTD. Since XML files have open format you can always
add new fields later to be used by newer or smarter packages.
As for the parsing, as far as I know there are enough tools to do this
in perl, python, C, C++ and Java to name the "the Big five", adding
programs to help shell scripts parse the files can be easy.
Even more so, for the intermdediate stage (which can be indefinit),
you can run scripts to parse the XML files back to "old style" format
(e.g. xinetd.conf format, or netenv shell scripts).
Cheers,
--Amos
--Amos Shapira | "Of course Australia was marked for
133 Shlomo Ben-Yosef st. | glory, for its people had been chosen
Jerusalem 93 805 | by the finest judges in England."
ISRAEL amos@gezernet.co.il | -- Anonymous
Reply to: