On 29 août 2014, at 01:33, Tim Graham <[email protected]> wrote:
> There have been some other movements to consolidate settings into a dict
> (e.g. #22734 for email settings) so it seems like we prefer this approach
> despite the drawbacks.
Indeed, I've noticed that grouping settings that share a common prefix in a
dict is often less convenient.
Advantages are limited:
- It improves the structure of the documentation.
- It ensures that related settings remain grouped together.
- It satisfies our craving for DRY.
- It artificially lowers len(dir(django.conf.global_settings)).
The two last items have especially little value.
The main drawback is that t's much less practical to change a single value in
that very common use case:
# myproject/settings/prod.py
from . base import *
FOO['BAR'] = 'baz'
If base.py doesn't define FOO, you have to copy or import the default value
from django.conf.global_settings. If it does, you can override some keys as
shown above, but FOO_BAR = 'baz' is still easier.
If it weren't for backwards compatibility, we could recursively merge dicts
from user settings into defaults settings. For example
https://github.com/django/django/pull/3138 achieves that in override_settings.
To me that PR looks like "let's fix the problem for ourselves in the test suite
and leave it for our users" :-/ If it's inconvenient to alter settings in
tests, it's just as inconvenient to combine them in projets that have several
settings modules.
EDIT: the PR has been merged while I was writing this email. I need to think
and type faster :-)
Considering how many settings we've turned into dicts, I'm wondering if we
should accept the consequences and implement the merging behavior. We'd have to
make sure that setting a key to None is equivalent to not providing it at all.
We could take this opportunity to review default values for settings, as we've
already done in a few specific cases.
Do you think we could accept that level of backwards incompatibility ?
--
Aymeric.
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