Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Init replacement

[Wesley Leggette <wleggette@gate.net>]

On Sun, 2003-05-04 at 15:25, Evan Powers wrote:
> On Sunday 04 May 2003 12:49 pm, Björn Lindström wrote:
> > SGML (and thus HTML) was never originally intended to be human
> > readable/hackable. The same goes for XML. It is designed to be
> > easily _parsed_, not easily _read_.
> 
> I think you've made an excellent point here, one people should not quickly 
> overlook. Though I'll take a slightly different perspective.
> 
> XML isn't intrinsically harder to read than any other general-purpose 
> expressive system. When humans say that it is, what they're really doing is 
> complaining that they cannot use domain-specific sub-syntaxes. (Or rather, 
> that they are discouraged from doing so.)
> 
> Example. Mathematical notation isn't /necessary/, people could just write "a 
> quantity named y equals the indefinite integral of f, a function of a 
> quantity named x, times the derivative of the quantity x". But they never do, 
> instead preferring to write "y=", a certain squiggle, and "f(x)dx".
> 
> Does anyone actually think a human is ever going to (voluntarily) write an 
> equation of even moderate complexity in MathML?
> 
> My point is this:
> 
> Starting and stopping most services is a task that can be broken down into 
> execing or fork-execing another program with a particular environment, 
> particular command line arguments, and particular input and output 
> redirections. Shell is a domain-specific language particularly suited to 
> expressing these operations.
> 
> I won't say that XML has no place, or that script snippets shouldn't be 
> embedded within an XML document, or that the script a human writes shouldn't 
> be immediately translated into its XML equivalent. I am saying, however, that 
> humans will insist on writing in the shell domain-specific language where it 
> is more convenient for them to do so, and that forcing them to do otherwise 
> in the name of anything is a long-term design mistake.
> 
> Which I suppose is a quite strong statement to make after all.
> 
> Evan
> 
> --
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Yes, you are absolutly right about people wanting to use a
domain-specific language when it is most convienent. It would be best to
incorporate bash scripts in any XML style system. XML is probably best
for metadata (like dependancies and such),. but the system should allow
people to use shell scripts when any tricky commands have to be issued
to start something up.
-- 
Wesley Leggette <wleggette@gate.net>


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