An analysis about a generic desktop application configuration management system

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 20:44 +0100, Dave Cridland wrote:

> In a perfect world, the configuration system itself could perform 
> version control, in effect, but none of them do as far as I know. 
> (I'd not be surprised if Avery told me that UniConf can, though.)

The current proposal on the wiki talks about integrating the system with
source control systems and other version management systems by making it
possible, using an API, to get and import configuration data from the
system.

"Importing" here basically means overwriting altered keys, appending new
keys and tracking/deleting deleted keys by interpreting a humanly
readable format (like a diff file).


On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 20:26 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:

> This shouldn't be a problem. If you use a database you should have 
> utilities to import/export xml files from Stdin/Stdout. A sysadmin can
> use these to retrieve all keys for a subtree as an xml text file, edit
> it and then import it back in. Of course thay can also be called from 
> scripts as well so I dont think having text files as the backend
> should be mandatory if there's a method to achieve the same effect for
> admin purposes.

Indeed. This is how it's currently proposed on the wiki. The support for
a humanly readable format (both importing and getting it) could be done
using both an API and a tool. Using the API, deeply integrated systems
can be build to do version management and creating backups or restore-
points.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
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