init: API

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Saturday, November 19, 2005 4:35 PM +0200 Gilboa Davara 
<gilboada at netvision.net.il> wrote:

> I was talking about /simple text/ parsers, no XML one.

How simple? Set the bar too low and you cripple some uses of it. XML's 
value is in generality. You don't actually have to use all of it. Simple 
applications can use very simple styles, and yet still be able to leverage 
the advanced features for corner cases like unusual characters and 
character sets. There's no requirement that your config file has to be 
complex. Package developers will have to support what they define, and 
won't want to spend all their time explaining a complex schema, unless 
their application is equally complex.

For those who love var=value pairs, one could always use m4 to expand that 
into equivalent XML, the way sendmail does to create its legacy cf file 
from the much simpler mc file.