Re: System administration with GNOME.

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris ariman ee>]

On 27 Mar 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:

>  - you need to represent the config file in-memory as a parse tree,
>    modify the parse tree, and then write the parse tree (libxml works
>    like this). If you slurp into a C structure, then convert back to 
>    the file format, there is no way to deal with comments, or with 
>    config file options you don't understand. With a parse tree you 
>    just leave stuff you don't know about as-is

Not always a good point ;-(
Imagine config file:

Option A
Option C

Where C is compatible with A, but incompatible with B
If configurator does not understand C, letting it as it is, and user
chooses B, we get file

Option B
Option C

Which may be not the thing, what you wanted.

Maybe this is only theoretical example, as I cannot at moment find any
such config file...

Lauris