[LINK] XML is evil

[David Lochrin]

To be fair, this is a criticism of the way in which Sun & Apple have engineered configuration management rather than of XML per se.  It would be interesting to hear the relevant software engineer's side of the story.

On Tuesday 18 November 2008 16:34, Rick Welykochy wrote:
> grove at zeta.org.au wrote:
> 
>> I am finding this especially with debugging Sun XML manifests in Solaris 10,
>> where previously you had a shell script and a text config file, 
>> now you have a series of commands, that reads the XML description of 
>> the service in then executes the script.
> 
> Apple is doing exactly the same thing in Darwin on OS X. They've moved away
> from, as you say, easy to edit and contemplate (and automate) plain text
> config files and scripts to a complex mess of XML, GUI tools for the XML,
> a viewer for the XML, etc.etc. (see: plists)
> 
> Example: one used to be able to turn of the vile resource hog on OS X called
> Spotlight by adding this line to a file in /etc/hostconfig
> 
> SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
> 
> Then without notification or any fanfare, they removed this ability and
> replaced it with a plist file. You must create a new XML file containing
> all sorts of crud in it, run a system utility to load that file and cross
> your fingers that it worked. If it doesn't, dive into the GUI tools and
> try to fix it. It's a real crock of snakes now.

David