As tempting as that may be, the ability to enforce ANSI SQL constraints (not null, unique, check, foreign key, etc.) could prevent many types of configuration errors.

If you want to grep everything in a sqlite database, then ".dump" it.

  $ echo "create table myconfig(param text, value text);
  insert into myconfig values('scrollbar', 'wide');
  insert into myconfig values('verbose', 'no');" | sqlite3 myconfig.db

  $ sqlite3 myconfig.db '.dump myconfig' | grep verbose

  INSERT INTO "myconfig" VALUES('verbose','no');

Good tips, thanks! I love sqlite3.

Yes! Let's also make every config file is its own special snowflake with its own syntax, keywords, and escape characters. That way, it's much harder for software to interact with these files and humans will have to write config templates for each deployment.

Oh and we might as well store these config file in a different place on each distro and move them around once in a while just to keep things interesting. Users can ignore upstream documentation and just strace the process if they wanna know where the files are this year.

You are suggesting good ideas, but we should go further. Let us write configuration files in Turing-complete exotic programming languages that almost nobody knows! This way malicious programs won't be able to parse them or perform automated edits, and many malicious humans too.

No need to get passive aggressive, parent has a legitimate point. Grep is a huge part of my workflow.

Ah I left out a few sentences. My passive aggressiveness is directed at the state of Linux distros today, not at the parent. I agree that his scheme is a lot better than the mess we deal with today.

> Grep is a huge part of my workflow.

You can flatten and grep structured binary formats too.

I honestly feel like you were just matching the tone of my comment so no harm done really. Mine was smarmy, yours passive aggressive. Its like a 90s sitcom in here!

Snowflakes are beautiful.

Better yet, put it in a .rec file for the best of both worlds: https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/