On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 09:10:58PM -0700, Jason Thorpe wrote:
> 
> But, really, there is apparently nothing other than personal taste  
> that is driving stuff like "SCN".  I think there needs to be a very  
> high bar set for gratuitous "personal taste" changes like this when  
> there are no concrete technical advantages.  I must say that I am  
> somewhat disappointed that Core hasn't put a stop to this N-I-H  
> nonsense.

I have to note that, in the painful discussion of this prior to now, you:

1a) Never responded -- at all -- to those who asked you whether Apple's
    UI team would actually permit a developer to force normal users to
    read or edit proplist XML plists (I think it's pretty blindingly
    obvious that the answer is "no")

2) Never responded in any substantive manner to the objections of those
   who noted that the XML plist format has serious usability issues as a
   format to be read or edited by humans

3) Never actually offered any explanation of why a more human-friendly
   plist externalization would be problematic, in applications where
   there is a high likelihood that human beings would have to edit plists,
   restricting yourself (uncharacteristically, and for some reason I really
   do not grasp) to irrelevant and inaccurate invective such as the above
   quoted "N-I-H nonsense."

Since one of the very nice things about proplib is that if you want XML
(or any other supported format), the library can always give it to you,
it's really hard to see why the only position in this conversation that
the phrase "N-I-H nonsense" applies to is not, in fact, yours.  What
harm, exactly, does it do you if some other people, who find that they
need to edit plists by hand, prefer to do so in a syntax they find
easier to use?  If you find that syntax so offensive, you can always
have proplib give you the XML you prefer instead.

If you're worried about compatibility between proplib implementations,
perhaps a more constructive thing to do would be to have Apple's library
take advantage of the convenient BSD-licensed code for SCN format now
available in NetBSD.  But don't shoot the messenger!

This change makes proplib much more useful for a broad class of applications
(and the actual human beings who have to configure them).  It's really hard
to see why you would find it so offensive.

As a practical matter, just about everyone else seems to like this format,
so it is probably going to stay -- just as the XML format is.

-- 
Thor Lancelot Simon	                               tls@rek.tjls.com
  "All of my opinions are consistent, but I cannot present them all
   at once."	-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On The Social Contract