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

[Philip Prindeville]

Ryan Burke wrote:
>> 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?
>   

Some require X, some use curses...

-Philip