On Aug 24, 2005, at 6:29 PM, David Jencks wrote:
On Aug 24, 2005, at 6:10 PM, Dain Sundstrom wrote:
Could I add things rather than override?
No. You can do that in the console, but this file just
lets you
override certain attributes for GBeans that are already in the
server.
You'll notice in the sample there aren't full GBean
definitions, only what
amounts to attribute=value entries.
Would anything stop you from doing that though?
I would. The idea here is to allow a few attributes to be
customized locally even on a server with immutable
configurations. editing your configuration contents should use a
different system. Most attributes and all references will not be
editable in this config db.
I believe that this strategy is a bad idea. What is going to
happen is every time we release the software, someone is going to
want to tweak a setting that we either forgot to make manageable,
or we wrongly believed shouldn't be managed. Why not make all
attributes* manageable?
I think perhaps ones point of view on this argument has something
to do with whether one thinks small versioned binary configurations
should be the basic unit of distributing and building a server. If
you think that versioned binary configurations basically won't
work, then there is no reason to ever inhibit any editing of any
configurations, ever, since each server has no discernable
relationship to any other server. If you think versioned binary
configurations are the one true path, then you need some way to
make sure that the allowed modifications to a versioned binary
configuration are rather small and don't affect its' essential
character: otherwise the version stops meaning anything.
Personally I would like to give versioned binary configurations a
good chance to see if we can make them work: I don't think we have
tried them yet, and if they can be made to work I think they will
be a really cool feature. I would prefer to see "arbitrary edits"
take place using something like the console or a special tool, and
only on unversioned mutable configurations.
Excellent point. I think that shipping an experimental configuration
system as the default is bit risky. As a long term idea, I think
that a binary configuration system would be a good option, but I
think in the near term we should focus providing a tried an true text
based configuration system as the default.
Now the big question: Is can we deliver a text based configuration
system before 1.0 or should we expand on Aaron's configuration
overrider to fill in the gap?
-dain
