Re: proplist [was: Importing xmlgrep into base]

[markucz%gmail.com@localhost]

> xmlgrep can be easily made to emmit valid proplib.
> ...implement binary proplibs or floating point support
*sigh*
I'm not worried if xml{grep,cat,sed,foo} will emit valid proplib. They
probably will. Nor am I worried about binary proplibs.

Now, imagine there's some general purpose tool which takes some input and
spits out a corresponding XML representation. Imagine someone uses this
hypothetical tool to generate proplib plists. To me, at least, this sounds
plausible. Now, how can you be sure proplib won't bite you in the ass (as has
already happened in 4.0, see e.g. [1]) and refuse to handle the tool's output
without problems? You can either
a) change the tool to also emit proplib's XML subset and add logic when it
should do so; or
b) change proplib to understand all of XML.

Point a) is acceptable if the number of such tools is small. Point b) is
probably the right thing to do but requires proplib to be extended / fixed /
partially rewritten. Admittedly, changing proplib's format to something else
will also require proplib to be (perhaps significantly) changed and a new
library written to replace libregxml. XML by itself is fine. The point is
that SDL / s-exps don't suffer from the bloat the XML standard imposes. 

Hope this makes thing clear. No hard feelings, OK?

Best regards

[1]http://mail-index.netbsd.org/security-announce/2009/06/23/msg000022.html