On Wed, 13 Jun 2007, Martin Husemann wrote:
> Why would a user want to force his "favorite" format? I can see the
> point where an application registers and uses it's own format, but not
> a user changing it via environment variables.

Applications are unlikely to care; they probably use the proplib API
to set and get values.  However, people who edit proplib files (or who
worry that they might sometimes have to edit proplib files) might very
well want to edit in a different format.

If the hand-editing problem is addressed by arranging for proplib to
save in the user's preferred format, then the sysadmin will probably
want to set a system-wide preferred format (e.g. via sysctl), and
unprivileged users may want to override that per application (e.g. via
an environment variable).

Another way of addressing the hand-editing problem wold be to have an
editor wrapper (e.g. "viproplib") that converts back and forth between
proplib's preferred format and the user's preferred format.

--apb (Alan Barrett)