Nothing against XML in general. But my feeling is that it's of most use when data needs to be shared by different applications maintained by different people. Or if you're using some generic off-the-shelf tool to accomplish a task and that tool needs XML.
I doubt there are too many apps out there (any at all?) that have a need to parse a hobbit config file. The things that come to mind as possibilities have already been covered by Hobbit built-ins, like bbhostgrep. And even if that one weren't available, I could hack out a quick shell script to get the info faster than I could review the XML schema and implement structured parsing of an XML config file. And I'm better than average with XML/XSLT.
My Hobbit client scripts are 99% custom things I've written. Many access XML files for various reasons (typically using XSLT). But that's because these client scripts share bits and pieces of the data with a wide diversity of other apps. Were it only the Hobbit client that needed the data, XML/XSLT would be way overkill.
-----Original Message----- From: Galen Johnson [mailto:Galen.Johnson at sas.com] Sent: Monday, May 21, 2007 12:21 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: RE: [hobbit] xml configs
WOW...well, this was an unexpected hot button. To me, XML is as easy as the current config but looks more structured and seems like it would be more easily expandible.
I just vi whatever file I need anyway so GUI's make no difference to me, either. I find it interesting to note that not a single response has been in favor. At most, a non-committal, luke-warm "makes no diff" is the "most" favorable I've seen.
It has been an interesting discussion, though.
=G=
-----Original Message----- From: Galen Johnson [mailto:Galen.Johnson at sas.com] Sent: Monday, May 21, 2007 11:08 AM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: [hobbit] xml configs
Hey Henrik,
I know this would be a rather significant change but have you considered switching hobbit to use xml based config files? I'm actually working on an external module that will use an xml config file and thinking about the schema, etc it occurred to me that hobbit would lend itself nicely to xml configs.
Just curious...
=G=
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