Better yet, a flat file structure that you can grep with standard utilities. We can put it somewhere convenient, like in dot files in the users home directory. We can even add them to git with something simple like git add *.*
If you want to grep everything in a sqlite database, then ".dump" it.
$ echo "create table myconfig(param text, value text);
insert into myconfig values('scrollbar', 'wide');
insert into myconfig values('verbose', 'no');" | sqlite3 myconfig.db
$ sqlite3 myconfig.db '.dump myconfig' | grep verbose
INSERT INTO "myconfig" VALUES('verbose','no');Oh and we might as well store these config file in a different place on each distro and move them around once in a while just to keep things interesting. Users can ignore upstream documentation and just strace the process if they wanna know where the files are this year.
> Grep is a huge part of my workflow.
You can flatten and grep structured binary formats too.