CFD: XMLification of NOTES

[Maxime Henrion]

Alexey Zelkin wrote:
> hi,
> 
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 02:32:46PM +1000, Bruce Evans wrote:
> > On Sun, 28 Mar 2004, Alexey Zelkin wrote:
> > 
> > > This weekend I have got some spare time (due to illness) and in order to get
> > > some rest from current tasks decided to pass thru old TODO file.  Most
> > > interesting task got my attention was old item related to XMLification NOTES.
> > 
> > Sorry about your illness.
> > 
> > In case silence is considered approval ... I checked the date and was
> > surprised to find that it was not April yet.
> 
> Advantages of this step are obvious, so I do not see any reasons joke.

I don't find that the advantages are obvious at all, see below.

> It almost does not add maintaince overhead costs, expect making sure that
> XML integrity preserved, but allows to add dependencies/conflicts checking
> for regular kernel configuration files

I fail to see how XML allows to add dependencies/conflicts checking for the
kernel configuration files.  Nothing prevents you to implement it with the
current file format, so this is a moot point.  A more valid point would be
that it may be easier to do it with XML.

> and provide easy interface to tools which need to know about NOTES content.

The current file format is already simple to deal with and the need for such
tools is very limited, so this doesn't strike me as a big win.

Now, on the other hand, converting kernel configuration files has huge
disadvantages :

- It would be a huge POLA violation.  Kernel configuration files are this
  way since a very long time now, with relatively minor changes from time to
  time.  The small benefits that converting to XML offers doesn't justify
  breaking POLA in my opinion.

- It would make those files much harder to read, as already pointed out by
  other people.  Generating text files from XML files is not an option, I
  want to be able to read my kernel configuration file while adding stuff
  to it.  (It would be even messier to generate text files because we'll
  end up with more copies of the same kernel configuration...)

- It would add significant build-time dependencies for building kernels.
  I don't want to need libexpat/libxml/whatever when building a kernel,
  even if we have it in the base source tree.

In short, please don't do this unless you can demonstrate significant
advantages of switching to XML format.

Cheers,
Maxime