Cleaning up configuration

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 11/04/2016 03:13 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 04, 2016 at 12:12:21PM +0100, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
>> On 11/04/2016 11:20 AM, Tor Lillqvist wrote:
>>> Also, would going through officecfg and looking for deprecated and
>>> actually no-op configuration thingies be a good Easy Hack?
>>
>> At least in principle, the tree of available configuration items is part of
>> the stable interface, accessible from 3rd party code.  So at least some
>> removals could be delicate.
>
> I guess we then need some kind of feature flag that is internal to
> LibreOffice, akin to what major web browsers now do for experimental
> features.
>
> For example I hate the experimental features flag, it puts a bunch of
> totally unrelated features under the same room, and too coarse in
> general. I was thinking we should kill it and have individual options
> for each experimental feature, but configuration options being a part
> of stable interface kills the whole idea.

Removal of configuration items isn't something that never happens.  And 
configmgr handles unknown items gracefully when reading stale .xcu/.xcd 
files, and 3rd party code programmatically accessing such items can be 
made robust too, by catching the relevant exceptions.  So removing 
configuration items isn't a stubborn no-no.  I wrote the original mail 
mainly to raise awareness (if necessary) that configuration items 
shouldn't come and go too arbitrarily.

(For experimental features, another option would be to use a single 
configuration property of type string-list, and each experimental 
feature is assigned a unique string token.)