On 5 Dec 2005, at 10:53, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
I'm over fed-up with environment variable.
When an environment stop working (because of new developement)
nothing warn the developer (I mean the compiler don't know). Its
application simply stop working without warning, without message,
without cause.
I think I could safely say now that environment variable are
inherently evil and should not be the only configuration method. A
programatic interface should exist to fix any problem!
In this case a programatic way to set GNUSTEP_CONFIG_FILE.
When Nicola and I designed the new config stuff, we tried to make
it extremely flexible while keeping it really simple. I'm not sure
why we left in the option of using an environment variable to
specify the location of the config file ... and I think you have
convinced me that it's an annoying complexity and should be removed.
Ah ... I take it back ... I have remembered why it was there ... it
was intended as an aide to development/testing so you can have
multiple setups running simultaneously using the same libraries/
resources, just slecting between them by setting the environment
variable before launching the app you are working with.
Perhaps documenting this well (and making the configuration with the
environment variable disabled be the default) would be sufficient
rather than removing the functionality entirely. I'm not sure
whether the feature is more trouble than it's worth?
Of course, you don't need a programmatic way to set
GNUSTEP_CONFIG_FILE ... you just set it when you build the make or
base libraries using --with-config-file=
It's something that needs to be set for the make package and for
the base library, not for an individual application (if an app
needed that level of isolation from other apps, it would be bundled
with its own copy of the core libraries).
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