Replace binary config file by plain text config file

[eanyx]

In latest Haiku release (nightly) most of config files are a species of binary format, (for example ~/config/settings/ScreenSaver_settings).

As haiku is not BeOS, and as it is free and opensource, why not having all config files in plain text?

It will be more readable, parsable for shell script, and for other uses (tweak).

note : For R1 with legacy BeOS support this cannot be an easy task. But it can be done for R2 (BeOS will then be run in emulation mode, and some translation of files can be done).

eanyx

[anevilyak]

Those are generally flattened BMessages, which can be dumped via the 'message' command.

[pulkomandy]

To complete this, the flatenned BMessage format is faster and easier to parse with our system APIs, more robust to format changes (fields can easily be added or removed), and has standardized support in many places (like a generic solution to handle "defaults" and "revert" buttons. All these far outweight the small advantage of the file being user editable, especially as the preference panels offer realtime application of the setting, while editing the config files would likely require a system reboot (or restart of some system component) to work.