Re: gnome-db 0.2 is ready

["Jean-Baptiste Nivoit" <jbnivoit ix netcom com>]

>> >    duplication. The Driver Manager has to access a ini file which is
>> >    in the infamous MS INI file syntax (same as the gnome ini
>> >    files). Either write another parser or use the Gnome parser.
>>
>> i hate to read that, in the end, gnome will finish with a lot of .ini
file
>> (you should have used another format i think) and will be quite
unmanageable.

This is true.

>Actually, why not use Guile? That is, use the way Guile represents data
>and then use Guile to parse it. It DOES say on the GNOME homepage that
Guile
That is a possibility.

>should extend programs, so I think it would be nice. It's a good thing to
keep the
>number of different file-formats used by GNOME as low as possible.
Why not use XML? We could make a DTD for configuration files that could be
generic enough.
We could have things like:

    <config-entry name="default directory" value="~/.bogusdir" />

Plus, with XML, you don't have to build a new config file parser each time,
just reuse the
one in libxml. We could also have some sorts of callbacks registered to the
XML parser
so that it can take actions when it's doing its parsing (such as setting the
value of a variable)...

Maybe we could elaborate on this, so that every Gnome app uses this to store
its configuration, and yet
they would all use the XML component the same way, without having to have a
dedicated one for each of them
(only a specific set of callbacks).

        jb


PS: Then i'm sure the SGML/XML gurus will tell us about whether to store
'values' (such as '~/.bogusdir') in
attributes or in tag content...