Quoting Omer Zak, from the post of Mon, 13 Jan: > I agree that this is a good and worthwhile idea. > May I suggest that we start defining an API and a standard configuration > library, and start encouraging application writers to migrate to the new > library?
famous last words? :) > An application will treat configuration information as an hash > (associative array). and who takes care of the name space, and what if you need stanzas (Apache and Samba come to mind) you will need to be acrobatic, since I know quite a few types of config files... (XML, lisp and other types of stanzas, plaintext hash such as fstab or a simple shell script to include, some that are only configurable at runtime since they are represented in objects of python, perl or Java and are serialized to disk every few minutes, and ofcourse configurations saved in SQL tables). You need to support locking of several instances reading the same configs, possibly a few writing too... and then it starts to look like a database. daemons for the configuration of each application? now who configures the config daemons? :) I like it lean and mean. instead of using unified config daemons, I say we stick to common, easely grokable formats. 2-3 archtypes that answer all our needs. apache, samba and bind should not have a different syntax, but daemon is an overkill of the other extreme. what are the chances this will happen in this decade? very slim, but good luck :) -- The man who fell to Earth Ira Abramov http://ira.abramov.org/email/ This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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