On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 9:47 PM, Jorge Schrauwen <jorge.schrau...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 9:07 PM, Akins, Brian <brian.ak...@turner.com> wrote: >> On 6/3/09 2:45 PM, "Jorge Schrauwen" <jorge.schrau...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> I have to admit lua would be more flexible but I think most server >>> admins have atleast come into contact with XML... while not >>> necessarily the case with lua. >> >> XML with conditionals. Please, make it stop... >> >> I think we are going to have to choose one way (the current way, lua, >> something else) and just go with it. >> >> Nice thing about lua is that the configuration is the runtime "script." >> There is no external and internal representation of things. (Well, not >> exactly, but close...). Lua is fast enough to just run every request - most >> of the "hard" stuff is still in C. >> > > I think going with a language "X" based config system will just give > us more horrible questions and make it even harder to trouble shoot > things like request X works but request Y doesn't. > > You might as well provide a building block method and the config c > based, will scare off the more casual users just like lua and only > allow the oncs who know what they are doing write a decent > configuration. (ok that last one is maybe a bit over exaggerated but > going pure program language based is a very big learn before usage > curve)
Lua is already used exclusively as a configuration language in many different softwares. It was actually first designed to be a configuration language and it was very successful in this area. "...To make a long story short, yes, we did develop Lua to solve a particular problem. Although we developed Lua in an academic institution, Lua was never an "academic language", that is, a language to write papers about. We needed an easy-to-use configuration language, and the only configuration language available at that time (1993) was Tcl. Our users did not consider Tcl an easy-to-use language. So we created our own configuration language..." -- http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/260022/-z_programming_languages_lua Lua can look like this : DocumentRoot = "/htdocs" ServerName = "www.example.com" VirtualHosts = { "www.example.com" = { DocumentRoot = "/example.com/htdocs" } } It doesn't have to look like code. If you don't want to learn programming, you don't have to because Lua code can look like a configuration. I think that the current Apache conf style could be easily converted into Lua syntax without having to rely on anything too fancy for non-programmers. But if you need power, then Lua probably offers the cleanest and fastest available in scripting languages. So you can get the best of both worlds :) -- Bertrand Mansion Mamasam
