Does this mean that a configuration file must be explicitly passed on the CLI or is there a default value?
No, but it can. Currently the embed driver _requires_ (AFAIK) a configuration file to be explicitely passed.
if we have to configure the driver we lose in usability
well I'm not convinced about that. If you look at the users-ml, the users have a hard time configuring xindice for their needs. How many users complained to not know where their database was created?
I see the point, but I'm not sure that I like this total anarchy. I might agree that each driver developer might specify her own configuration file format, but in the end there must be some sort of centralized configuration management system.
"total anarchy" is not how I would caracterize the proposed solution. Xindice has currently 2 drivers: one requires a configuration file on the CLI and the other one not. On the opposite, the xmlrpc driver needs a configuration on the server side.
I think a good test would would be to develop the webdav driver and see what kind of configuration we need.
I'm not opposed of going with default values, but I want to at least give the user some configuration options (which is not case at the moment).
-Vladimir
-- Vladimir R. Bossicard Apache Xindice - http://xml.apache.org/xindice
