On 6/28/07, Greg A. Woods <woods@planix.com> wrote:

> I.e. to paraphrase:
>
> I think that the human need to edit plists in a non-binary format should
> be provided via an editor wrapper that reads the binary file, converts
> it to the user's preferred format, spawns the user's preferred editor,
> and then converts back to binary.
>
> If you can't swallow that then you have to toss out your own argument
> for XML for the very same reasons.

I don't recall anyone mentioning it explicitly, but XML itself has a
technical advantage of being a cross-platform format already, and
plist specifically has a public DTD.  Any XML processing tools are
thus capable of working with plists, without needing to use proplib.

Of course, this might not matter to anyone.  Maybe nobody is
interested in processing their /etc config files with XML tools.
Maybe webmin-style things simply aren't desirable.

But it's still a technical point that a format exists that is widely
known and does not require NetBSD's own proprietary library to do
automated work with.

> I see no reason for the kernel version to support any codecs other than
> the binary one.

The reason given for XML here was to support an in-kernel dmg driver,
as dmg apparently encodes critical information in plist form.  Did you
miss that post, or are you just not interested in such a thing?