[wildfly-dev] Pretty-printing XML validation errors

[Toby Crawley]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 9:38 AM, Tomaž Cerar <tomaz.cerar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Also on top of this, having something like that would glorify configuration
> of server via XML,
> which is something we are trying to discourage  in favor of CLI / mgmt api.

I suspect I'm not the typical WildFly user, but I never use the
CLI/API to configure or deploy. I much prefer to edit configuration by
hand, and don't like requiring the server to be up to configure
it. And Aleksandar has raised the issue about immutable deployments -
if you use the CLI for every config change, you have to spin up the
server before or as part of your build process in order to generate a
configuration file to put into your container. But all that is
orthogonal to the pretty-printing discussion.

With regards to glorifying editing the XML - I disagree. If a user
already prefers editing the XML over using the CLI, this makes things
more pleasant for them. If this makes editing the XML more appealing
than using the CLI to people that would normally prefer the CLI, then
that would imply there is room for improvement in the feedback that
that CLI gives.

> Another problem is also that it relies on XSD which are not always 100%
> correct, which should be fixed (but that is another problem)
>

I agree, if the schemas aren't correct, we should fix that.

> There are also ideas about implementing non xml backend for storage of our
> configuration.
> type of storage for the backend shouldn't really matter as users should be
> interacting via API / CLI not by manually modifying the file.

If another backend is being considered, I hope it too will be
user-editable. And if it is, a similar feedback tool could be applied
to it.