On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, Curt Sampson wrote:

> 
> Well, it depends on what you mean by `unified.' If you mean a
> database of some sort that's more unified than a bunch of files in
> /etc, one for each application, then no, I don't want to see that.
> As soon as you get into a unified single database it becomes *very*
> hard to track exactly who has made what changes and where. And, of
> course, such a thing tends to be difficult to maintain in text
> format anyway. There is, of course, no question of using any other
> format, since that would go right against the unix philosophy and
> make the standard tools we already have (sed, grep, etc.) useless
> for manipulating it.
> 

Where there are databse lookups the databases are built from editable
ascii files. If this philosphy was maintained could a scheme be
developed that was acceptable ?

-Sean