First, apologies if this is not appropriate for the opensim-dev list. I
felt like the best fit at the time.
I have been recently attempting to implement a utility for OpenSim that, in
part, handles configuration. Part of this utility is comprised of a
component that reads OpenSim's INI files while taking advantage of those
special helper comments that provide guidance about some options. An
example might be:
[NPC]
;# {Enabled} {} {Enable Non Player Character (NPC) facilities} {true
false} false
Enabled = true
Those helper comments (prefixed with ;# ) really are very potentially
useful, but now that I've made some progress, I'm beginning to have some
questions..I'm relying on many assumptions and expectations in my work, and
I'd like to be certain my expectations have a reasonable basis. Helper
comments currently always precede an actual key/value pair. I'd have to
make further refinements in the off chance that the reverse could occur.
(And who wants more work? Hehe.)
Anyway, currently what I'm doing is skipping all commented lines, with the
exception of reading in all of the helper comments, These indicate that a
section's key/value pair exist, what it's for, etc. I add the key/value
pair, along with the other information provided by the helper comment to my
data structure, and assign the default value, but mark the option as not
enabled, allowing fallback to OpenSimDefault's values. If the helper
comment is soon followed by a conventional, uncommented, matching key/value
pair, I update it by taking the value from that, and then mark it as
enabled.
The idea in the end is to load INI's into a GUI, allow configuration in a
(hopefully) pretty UI, and then to write out INI files tailored for a
user's simulator.It's much simpler for me to allow the INI files provided
by the OpenSimulator project to act as my reference corpus, rather than to
try to maintain my own ever changing database of options that would need to
be updated myself with each significant change in options. Not to mention
attempting to make such a database interoperable with different versions of
OpenSim.
I've noticed that not all options have these helper comments, some examples
being a few of XEngines options regarding threads or AppDomainLoading. Was
this a deliberate omission to indicate they these should not be touched
lightly? I can see cases where options should just be handled carefully,
like anything dealing with database configuration. It looks to me like some
of these really ought to be assessed by a user, like those in
StandaloneCommon.ini's GridInfoService section, or the GridCommon.ini's
many service URI options. Helper comments seem like they could be
beneficial in these cases, and possibly others.
I'm also curious whether anyone else has made use of these helper comments,
and to what degree of success?
Thanks,
Marcus Llewellyn
_______________________________________________
Opensim-dev mailing list
Opensim-dev@lists.berlios.de
https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
