There’s several debates exclusive to the Unix-like world: Vi vs. Emacs, System V vs. BSD, and so on. A more recent one that people tend to fragment over is XML in config files vs. anything else. Read through this recent threa, starting here, about SMF (which became about XML) on users@.
A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Xml sucks. But an init system based on xml? Just shoot me now.
http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/
Yes, XML really sucks as a configuration file. In other areas, I don’t see how XML can be better than JSON. But maybe I just don’t know.
Why does XML suck?
Xml sucks, mostly because xml support in unix utilities sucks. Get the xml-coreutils tools into the core utils and even unix-beards will start loving it.