UniConf auto: configuration

Thomas Leonard tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Sun Aug 8 18:43:57 EEST 2004


On Thu, Aug 05, 2004 at 12:41:21PM -0400, Avery Pennarun wrote:
[...]
> > Could the config file be $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/uniconf.conf [1]? That would
> > allow users to override it (for example, if I get a login somewhere else,
> > I can make it get my settings from my main machine, just for my user).
> 
> That's probably a good idea.  The nice thing is that *this* particular
> string is hardcoded into the UniConf library itself in only one place, so we
> or a distribution maintainer can set it to whatever we/they want.
> 
> If we're feeling crazy, auto: could also use the list: moniker (since the
> uniconf configuration itself is just any old uniconf moniker):
> 
> 	list: default:ini:$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/uniconf.conf \
> 		default:ini:/etc/uniconf.conf

Note that the $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS notation means following the base dir spec,
which includes coping with multiple directories, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, and
using the specified defaults:

http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/basedir-spec


It's possible that we could put up a specification dealing with just this
meta-config file (and not call it 'uniconf'), so that uniconf would be
just one implementation of a configuration system which used the
freedesktop.org config system.

I don't know whether people think that's worthwhile. Having separate
implementations might mean that a sysadmin tells all applications to store
config in a database, and some of them complain that they don't support a
database back-end. Then we'd need a second spec to let us share backends
between front-ends.

It feels a bit cleaner to me to have things specified so that any
implementation will do, but just getting everyone to use a single library
works too.


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk	tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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