I'm just wondering if there is an interest in developing a common infrastructure in Apache to support GUIs. At the moment, each GUI project has to create its own definitions of what directives do what, what arguments they expect, how they merge, how they are validated, etc.
While this is probably fine to some degree, all the projects will have problems supporting different versions of Apache (that is, if a directive changes name, the GUI program will have to updates its definition for that directive), and probably more importantly, supporting varying versions of different dynamically loaded modules could get tricky. Ultimately it would be nice to be able to get all the required information about directives from the server itself (like a souped-up version of mod_info). But initially it could just come from a file distributed with Apache or with each third-party module. This would give information about each directive, as above. It would provide sufficient information for GUI front-ends to ask for input for the directive, validate the input, and add it to the appropriate place in the configuration file(s). Is there any interest in this approach? Paul -- Paul Sutton, C2Net Europe http://www.eu.c2.net/~paul/ Editor, Apache Week .. the latest Apache news http://www.apacheweek.com/
