Re: [Sheflug] GUI vs CLI and config file formats

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Martin" == Martin P Holland <m.holland [at] noether.freeserve.co.uk> writes:

    Martin> This last point is possibly exactly my point. Everyone has
    Martin> there own really cool configuration file format. Total
    Martin> anarachy. This is a bad feature of unix.  There should be
    Martin> a more standardised format that is flexible enough to deal
    Martin> with all cases. xml may or may not be it.

Anything Turing-capable will do; flat ASCII, XML, TeX, C, ...

Look, Windose has a standard config file format; nobody would ever
think an .ini file is an .outi file.  Big deal; parsing the mo'fo' can
still be hell.  Unix config files are called 'run command' ("rc")
files for a reason.

Certainly shells etc should use their own idiosyncratic syntax as
config language.

    >> Right; what I meant was that kppp should automagically set the
    >> debugging higher, and help to produce a bug report.

    Martin> No No No! It should diagnose the problem. There should be
    Martin> no sending of reports.  Noone should be wasting time
    Martin> reading ppp logs. If linux has 100 million users the
    Martin> newsgroups will be unsuable if they are packed with people
    Martin> posting ppp log files.

Bull.  You have a separate .post-logs-here channel and you apply the
usual social pressure to people who post logs to other channels.  It's
just another form of "binary" channel.

If and when the "algorithm" that the experts use is determined, then
program it and use it to filter the logs.  In the meantime, post the
whole thing.

    Martin> However, newbies will never fire up emacs so this is
    Martin> besides the point.

http://www.xemacs.org/

    Martin> Don't disagree with that. The experts should be doing the
    Martin> decoding and the experts' knowledge should be encapsulated
    Martin> in the program.

Right---and the way to accomplish that is to post the logs and apply
neural nets/su\imulated annealing.  Hm?

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