On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Trevor Talbot wrote:
> >All that's necessary for you to be able to edit in your preferred
> >format is for *one* proplib-using application to expose the ability to
> >convert between different formats.  Then you run "plistedit --format
> >xyzzy /etc/foobar.conf" instead of "vi /etc/foobar.conf".  Yes, this is
> >jumping through a hoop, but I think it's an easy jump.
> 
> Right, but once you're at this stage of using a format-converting tool
> to edit your supposedly human-friendly no-tools-required configuration
> files, you've completely lost the benefits of having so many formats.

You seem to be saying:  "If you use a format-converter, ostensibly to
take advantage of having multiple formats, then you actually lose the
benefit of having multiple formats."  Sorry, I can't understand the
reasoning behing such a statement.

> Might as well just pick one format and let the editing tool do all the
> work, since nothing else benefits from it.

I think you misunderstood me.  There is no specialised "editing tool"
in my scenario, there's just the user's favourite text editor, being
invoked on a temporary file in the user's favourite format.  My
hypothetical "plistedit" application does hardly any work; it's just a
few proplib calls to convert the input into a temporary file in whatever
format the user asked for, fork/exec to run the user's preferred editor,
and then a few proplib calls to convert the file format back again and
replace the original file.

--apb (Alan Barrett)