Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
On Wed, 2 Nov 2005 19:33:37 +0100 Jan Kundrát <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
| "Once this tool is implemented and well tested it can be integrated
| into portage."
can ! will. It might, but don't count on it.
| GLSA already contains stuff for marking items as valid only for given
| systems, for "injecting" them etc. Why don't use existing code? Why
| duplication?
Because it's quicker to invent a wheel which is actually round.
Reinventing rounder wheels seems to be a common hobby.
| > You think XML magically makes things compatible? Then I suggest you
| > write a GuieXML to Docbook conversion tool, and see how many
| > thousand lines of XSLT it takes. All XML does is move the
| > conversion and parsing problems to a different, more complex level.
|
| I'm not familiar with DocBook, but I doubt I'll need thousands of
| lines of code.
Oh? Our GuideXML to HTML conversion is thousands of lines of code...
Plain wrong, but you have always made it clear that you are not only biased
against XML for anything, but also very much XML challenged.
Don't worry, some are even worse than you are, worse enough to claim that XML
is hard to parse because "XML files from a programming perspective require
extra logic to parse. Compare the following key value pair and xml tag pseudo
parsing logic for configuration:
<tag1>entry</tag1>
Hit a >, tag1 as realized tag name, read until <, read ahead one to ensure a
closing slash, read until > to get the tag name, compare tag name with
previous tag name to see what tag it's closing. store value attached to tag1."
Just a short sample against metadata.xml using ruby/dom instead of python/sax:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~neysx/metax.rb
Discarding XML for the reasons some are using is like recommending key=value
flat .ini files because windows used it in the 80s.
They have to be parsed as well, and, as opposed to XML, you have to check for
unknown keys, double keys, missing ones, then you need some grouping and you
introduce [sections], which you have to check as well, no doubles, no missing
ones, no illegal ones, then you need a deeper hierarchy and you use
key=/path/to/another/file.ini...
Both have reasons to be used, neither is a one-fits-all answer.
Anyway, this is getting off-topic, and, FWIW, I believe the suggested format
is adequate because it is light, easy to write, read, parse, and even
transform into XML should one process ever need it. Besides, it is very much
standard, if it's good enough for billions of mail and http messages a day,
it's probably good enough for us.
--
/ Xavier Neys
\_ Gentoo Documentation Project
/ French & Internationalisation Lead
\ http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en
/\
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