I am against designing a programming language piece by piece. I'm not
convinced that we will reach a point in time where the config language
won't have "just one more thing" that will make it more useful to somebody.
For example, I could make a nice use of a macro.
I believe the configuration file syntax should avoid being procedural - you
think config syntaxes are hard to debug now, just wait! mod_perl and its
ilk have shown that programmatic interfaces to the configuration interface
can be done outside the core very effectively. There is also no good
reason why a procedural configuration interface can't *generate* a flat
descriptional configuration file, and if you roll it up into httpd.start
script then it's just as transparant to the end-user.
A procedural configuration file would also become very difficult to
represent in a GUI. Anyone know of a good Visual Perl tool? :)
I think the config engine should be frozen for the rest of 1.3 to allow the
GUI efforts to grow, and I think for 2.0 we should examine moving the
config language to something like XML.
Brian
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