Reports of procmail's death are not terribly exaggerated

Reports of procmail's death are not terribly exaggerated

And I'm still *VERY* fuzzy on what the advantage of all this stuff is over keyword = value config files - don't start with the XML crap, either, it's mostly a longer version of keyword = value...

Show the designers a keyword = value config file that is as powerful as a regexp while maintaining similar size, and I'm sure they'll be happy to adopt it. But for this specific application, you really need a full regexp engine to do what you want to do. It might be possible to improve readability a bit with some syntactic sugar, but that's a very tricky balancing act. It's very easy to bloat the syntax to the point that it loses readability.

More generally, I share your dislike for overuse of XML but I understand it. XML is a fairly heavyweight solution, but it comes with some really nice tools that make it easy to read, write, and validate. I get the impression that people wind up using even when they might be better served with a lightweight keyword = value file because they want to be future proof- who knows if the config file might blow up into a monster in the future- and because they know and are used to working with the XML toolset.