svn commit: r268491 - head/usr.bin/users

[Jordan Hubbard]

On Jul 10, 2014, at 10:20 AM, David Chisnall <David.Chisnall at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> This is important in a wider context.  For example, in the project to add machine-readable output to core utilities, we'd like to be able to parse these into the same machine-readable format.  Apple has the CoreFoundation library for this, which provides a load of stuff, but most importantly number, string, date, dictionary, and array types (i.e. the sorts of things that you'd want in JSON-like serialisation formats).

Just as important as CoreFoundation are APIs like CFPreferences.  I find it frankly horrifying that in the year 2014, anyone who writes a new daemon or system service will have to invent their own ad-hoc configuration file format in /etc (because, you know, there really aren't enough of them there now) as well as their own out-of-band mechanism for detecting when the configuration data changes. Having a data serialization format would the first step.

- Jordan