Here's another reason to be able to edit that in a text file.
In our shop, we have several developers working on ACS-backed stuff. We needed a way for each of them to be able to work on an ACS instance, but we didn't want to have to duplicate the ACS schema for each developer--it would be too hard for the less-experienced developers to handle that, unexpected breakage from schema changes would appear much later in testing, etc. So we wrote scripts that would let us embed "metavariables" in parameter.ini and nsd.tcl. Then when a developer starts up his/her instance of AOLserver, instance-specific values for variables would be substituted in.
This has worked fantastically for us.
ACS 4 broke it completely.
There was no way to offer the "many developers-one schema" version of stuff anymore. I even looked to see if we could add a field to the parameters table so we could designate a different parameter "scope", or create a "view" to the parameters table that would be specific to a particular user, but no dice.
Henry, if you need more specifics on what we did, let me know. How is this coming, BTW?
