[dev] 2.3.x installer

[Jon Parise]

On Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 10:34:58PM -0600, Brent J. Nordquist wrote:

> ...you know the conclusion that I reached along this train of thought?
> Configuration files as XML documents.  No, no, wait, I can hear the groan
> from here, but at least toy with the thought for a moment:  XML provides a
> way to mandate a well-formed document, the parser is already there to
> read/validate it, types are there, it copes with missing and extra tags
> (forward/backward compatibility), you can use richer style tags in the
> prose descriptions...  Wow.
 
Sure, that would be really nice, but it's not practical when you
consider out situation.  We'd basically need to write our own
configuration parser so push the XML-encoded data into a PHP
structure, which adds a step over what we have now.  There's also the
performance hit and the fact that not everyone will have the PHP
extensions compiled into PHP (I don't think we should have an
additional requirement just to read configuration files).

Also, as far as the installer goes, we'd need to make sure the user
installed the Perl XML module in order for a Perl installer to work.

-- 
Jon Parise (jon@csh.rit.edu)  .  Rochester Inst. of Technology
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~jon/  :  Computer Science House Member