I gather from reading other posts that this is a different format than Zope 3's ZCML. Would it be worth it to at least make some sort of 'ZCML Lite' to do this sort of configuration? The main thing I'm concerned about is that there's a whole new Zope coming down the road that depends heavily on configuration files, and it might make sense to start weaning people onto its general syntax if Zope 2's finally going to have a config file.
There was a conscious decision to have two different "configuration" language: ZCML for *software* configuration, and ZConfig for *process* configuration. A sysop is not expected to have to edit ZCML, but she will definitely have to edit the ZConfig file. Since XML is not designed for routine editing/reading by humans (its "human-readability" is a debugging feature), ZConfig uses a more readable format. It's documented in the ZConfig CVS tree.
ZRS? This isn't the long-discussed replicated storage is it?
Yes, http://www.zope.com/Products/ZopeProducts/ZRS --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)