winscape 2335
XML is a lousy format for that sort of thing. It solves the easy problems and on the strength of that it butterts that the hard ones are also solved. OTOH given...
Belatedly following up ....
Yeah, this is one of the great things about the traditional Unix way of doing things. I say "traditional" because it seems like Linux, or at least the distribution(s) I've used (RedHat and now Fedora Core) don't make it particularly easy to do this -- sure, the config files are all still in your home directory, but if you use anything close to the default setup (graphical login with GNOME as the desktop environment), good luck figuring what's in which files. Customizing these environments is .... Well, the information's all still stored in text files, but they're designed to be customized by pointing and clicking, and figuring out where that information is stored is, AFAICT, not particularly trivial. Further, installing a new version of the desktop environment seems to result in an attempt by the d.e. to (silently and automatically) convert the configuration files, sometimes correctly and sometimes not, and if the conversion isn't a success .... Well, the solution I hear people recommend is "delete all the configuration files and let the desktop environment recreate them when you log in again" -- which at least returns you to a known state, but of course wipes out any customizations.
I blame this on excessive exposure to Windows at a formative stage, of course.
Mess" is not a bad description, AFAICT: Looking at the dot-something files and directories in my home directory, there's .gnome, .gnome2, and .gnome2private. (Why all three? Yeah.) But there's also .gconf and...
Ranting only marginally related to the topic, maybe ....
-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
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