Re: use and abuse of debconf

[Nicolás Lichtmaier <nick@debian.org>]

  Just a thought: What about having, for each kind of config file, a program
that converts it from and to an XML version, so:

-----------------------
# This is a comment
auto lo eth0

iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet static
        address 10.1.2.2
        network 10.1.0.0
        netmask 255.255.0.0
        broadcast 10.1.255.255
        gateway 10.1.2.254
        up ifconfig eth0:0 10.1.2.22 netmask 255.255.0.0 broadcast
10.1.255.255
        down ifconfig eth0:0 down
-----------------------

would become:

<interfaces>
<comment>This is a comment</comment>
<auto>lo</auto>
<auto>inet</auto>
<auto>loopback</auto>

<iface name="lo" family="inet" method="loopback"/>

<iface name="eth0" family="inet" method="static">
	<address>10.1.2.2</address>
	<network>10.1.0.0</network>
	<netmask>255.255.0.0</netmask>
	<broadcast>10.1.255.255</broadcast>
	<gateway>10.1.2.254</gateway>
</iface>

</interfaces>

---------------------

 This would provide:

  * A generic way to show hierarchical configuration data (I think that
    any config file can be expressed in an information tree).

  * A standard way to refer to a configuration option (xpath):
		/interfaces/iface[1] would access the first iface, and
		/interfaces/iface[2] the second.

  * The config file writer (and other tools) could easily created
    with XSLT.