The config file format shouldn't need to be modified. Obviously they're already machine-readable! The problem is that people write myopic GUI config tools. They should be using something like augeas.
Augeas is a configuration editing tool. It parses configuration files in their native formats and transforms them into a tree. Configuration changes are made by manipulating this tree and saving it back into native config files.
Augeas is:
An API provided by a C library
A command line tool to manipulate configuration from the shell (and shell scripts)
Language bindings to do the same from your favorite scripting language
Canonical tree representations of common configuration files
A domain-specific language to describe configuration file formats
Augeas goals:
Manipulate configuration files safely, safer than the ad-hoc techniques generally used with grep, sed, awk and similar mechanisms in scripting languages
Provide a local configuration API for Linux
Make it easy to integrate new config files into the Augeas tree
around the same level of recognition as Dijkstra, I would say.
Bah. Knuth wrote volumes of books full of algorithms. I can't think of a single algorithm that Dijkstra ever came up with.
IANAL, but the GPL does not affect your rights as the user of a piece of software. It affects your rights as a distributor of that software or derivatives of it.
Happiness is twin floppies.