On 6/25/07, Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@rek.tjls.com> wrote:

> What harm is done if we have 8,000 different syntaxes, if the tools do
> seamless conversion between them all?

Er, I thought the point of having a human-editable format was to avoid
requiring the use of tools.  If I'm setting up a system and am
expected to edit some conf files for various related parts of it,
every one of which has a different format for no apparent reason, my
reaction is going to be "what a complicated mess", tools or no tools.
Probably followed by much cursing and mumbling about bloat, depending
on how much I wanted to get done today...

(In regard to "seamless", does that mean proplib transports comments
between formats also?)

When tools are required, there's no point to having multiple storage
formats in the first place, since you just use the provided editor to
make changes.

If the goal here is to unify configuration handling, as it appears to
be, the very last thing you want to do is make an administrator's life
harder just because you couldn't make a decision about the technology
behind it.  And on top of that, you make things harder for developers
as well -- besides more code to do something fairly simple, they also
have to make user/administrator-friendly decisions without guidance.

That's where the harm comes in.