On Apr 11, 2008, at 12:54, Noah Slater wrote:
I'm not very comfortable with changing the config file
programmatically. In
that case I'd want to be able to validate its structure after a
change to make
sure nothing broke (and I am not suggesting XML here). On the other
hand, if
we can make that reliable, I might feel better.
See above example of a Python library that can parse, serialise and
validate INI
style configuration files. I am sure that similar libraries must
exist for other
languages.
If we can find or port this to Erlang: Very cool :) I'd rather not
introduce a dependency on Python (or any other language for that
matter).
The use of JSON sounds nice as it removes a possibly tedious and
error prone
parsing and generating step for the config module and I think JSON
is enough
of a plaintext format to qualify for a configuration file. People
dealing
with CouchDB would need to know JSON anyway and for those who don't
it is easy
enough to read.
As I mentioned before, the INI style configuration is a de facto
standard and we
should use it if we can for that reason alone
I'm personally not seeing INI files as a de facto standard, but I
don't care either way as long as things are robust on easy to use. If
INI does that job, it is very welcome.
I think it is a false argument to suggest that people dealing with
CouchDB need
to know JSON - any corporate database will have many people all
interacting with
it at various levels. You can't expect the system administrators to
know or care
about JSON or to want to use a web based interface for configuration.
Hence my sentence finished with: "… and for those who don't it is easy
enough to read." Any junior DBA should be able to read a key-value
list marked up in JSON. But as cleared on IRC, we are in violent
agreement here.
Cheers
Jan
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