configuration system notes

[Avery Pennarun]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 10:18:23AM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Existing systems are not right:
> 
>  - Uniconf solves a different problem (gluing together other systems)
>    while punting on important aspects of what we should be doing here.
>    "Make it configurable" is not a good answer to most programming 
>    questions (not even the question "how should the config system work")

While it is certainly true that UniConf punts many important decisions that
are actually very important to how the configuration system should work, its
configurability cannot possibly be considered a disadvantage.  Let's face
it, the configuration system is a scalable, potentially distributed, data
storage repository.  There are an awful lot of ways to store data, and they
all exist because they're all useful sometimes.  For this type of problem,
if it isn't flexible, then it's inferior.

On the other hand, all those aspects that are being punted actually need to
be dealt with.  I would like to have those specified clearly, perhaps by
xdg, so that it's possible to actually build a system that does what we
want.

Have fun,

Avery