[asterisk-users] Using XML for configuration management, single-source-of-truth, etc.

[Ryan Burke]

> Tilghman Lesher wrote:
>> On Friday 07 December 2007 20:12:12 Philip Prindeville wrote:
>>
>>> Darryl Dunkin wrote:
>>>
>>>> You can store most of the configurations in a database which may be
>>>> more
>>>> accessable to you.
>>>>
>>>> Perl can also parse these configurations quickly enough if you know
>>>> how
>>>> to use the input record seperator ($/) properly.
>>>>
>>>> The only thing Asterisk will not store which you would probably need
>>>> is
>>>> the actual MAC address of the phones themselves. This may be done
>>>> easily
>>>> enough as comments in the users sip.conf section.
>>>>
>>> That's sort of my point:  that you have to reinvent it, and it's easy
>>> to
>>> get wrong.
>>>
>>
>> XML wouldn't make it any less wrong.  There's a difference between
>> parsing
>> it syntactically (which XML fixes) and parsing it semantically (which
>> XML does
>> not).
>>
>> In fact, I find the configuration files, as they are now are much EASIER
>> to
>> parse than XML.  With XML, you need to load up a whole state engine to
>> ensure
>> the config is properly formatted.  At the simplest level, the config
>> file
>> as-is is simply a set of key/value pairs, which syntactically is very
>> easy to
>> parse.
>>
>> Part of the allure of the current format is also that it is human
>> readable,
>> which assists in manual editing.  I'm not sure what part of the universe
>> you
>> have be from to make XML human readable (or more importantly,
>> human-editable),
>> but I am quite sure it is not from this planet.
>>
>>
>
> Well, after hand-coding HTML and SGML for 15+ years, XML isn't all that
> much of a stretch.
>
> More to the point though, there are some excellent schema-driven
> configuration managers for XML, so you wouldn't have to edit the files
> by hand.
>
> -Philip
>

Can these configuration managers run from a command line? Or do they
require  a graphical environment?