RE: Re: config files on Windows

> From: Jay Freeman (saurik) [mailto:saurik@saurik.com]
>
[bunch of stuff about files being good for configuration data due to
ease of copying, etc...]

> ACK! Are those ini files! *sobs quietly at his desk* With Windows
> moving
> to (and OSX already at) using XML as the container for configuration
(even
> if the hierarchial assumptions tend to be weak on both platforms), and
> Unix
> never having wanted to touch ini files, how did Subversion end up
choosing
> ini files as it's way of storing configuration files?
>

It's all about the file editing environment. Forcing people to hand edit
XML files via vi, Emacs, or any favorite editor of your choice just
isn't a very nice thing at all.

The Subversion folks aren't about to stick a UI to edit the
configuration file in 1.0. They're simply too busy doing everything
else.

Machine generated XML files (esp. those generated via using a DOM-like
object model) aren't generally known for generating human editable
output.
(i.e. no pretty printing, and no line feeds)

Thus the choice for INI files. They might not be hierarchical, but
they're really easy to edit and it drastically reduces the need for an
editing UI.

Besides, how many configuration files do you know that need to be
queried 27 different ways from Sunday using complex XPath, or indeed
XQuery queries?

More to come about what I think we should do for Windows in a response
to Branko's email.

Bill

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Received on Wed Mar 27 00:00:28 2002