Re: [PLUG] XML, text, and the development of unix

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 10:29:05PM -0500, Alex Birch wrote:
> What would happen if you did a grep "user" /etc/passwd.xml ?
> considering the xml is like this:
> <user name="foo" password="bar3134" group="superfoo" 
> directory="/home/foo"> etc.
> 
> This would allow people to switch the order and include : in user names :-)

I note they would then be precluded from using any of <, >, =, ",
and, if your parser is clumsy "name", "group", and "directory"...

The real answer to Jeff's question is that you do the same thing
about XML files that you do about NIS(+) and LDAP maps: you write
some software to dump them (in the standard /etc/passwd format, of
course) and process that with your scripts.

But I think having XML files replace passwd would be ridiculous.
It'll make programmatic access to those files slower, which is
pretty definitely not something you want. It also violates the
principle of least surprise (it's been the way it is for a long
time), and it's fixing something that isn't broken.

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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