Replacing init with Upstart (Linux.com)

Replacing init with Upstart (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 6, 2006 18:31 UTC (Fri) by dododge (subscriber, #2870)
In reply to: Replacing init with Upstart (Linux.com) by pphaneuf
Parent article: Replacing init with Upstart (Linux.com)

Editability of the classic property list format isn't bad at all

Well it is and it isn't. An issue with Apple's plist XML is that it's actually poorly designed for being XML. It throws all of the keys and values together in a big pile and relies on the order of the elements to associate them with each other:

  <dict>
    <key>key1</key>
    ...value1...
    <key>key2</key>
    ...value2...
  </dict>

You can edit this by hand easily enough, and of course use programs and libraries that are specifically designed around the plist format. But it's very difficult to process and transform the data meaningfully with generic XML tools such as xslt because there's no real XML-level binding between the keys and values. Any number of slight changes to the format would solve this, for example:

  <dict>
    <item key="key1">...value1...</item>
    <item key="key2">...value2...</item>
  </dict>

At this point the "bad" plist design is probably way too ingrained to fix it. What you end up with is a format that has all of the bad properties of XML but not so many of the good ones.

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