On Apr 11, 2008, at 12:54, Noah Slater wrote:
>
>> I'm not very comfortable with changing the config file
>> programmatically. In
>> that case I'd want to be able to validate its structure after a
>> change to make
>> sure nothing broke (and I am not suggesting XML here). On the other
>> hand, if
>> we can make that reliable, I might feel better.
>
> See above example of a Python library that can parse, serialise and
> validate INI
> style configuration files. I am sure that similar libraries must
> exist for other
> languages.
If we can find or port this to Erlang: Very cool :) I'd rather not
introduce a dependency on Python (or any other language for that
matter).
>> The use of JSON sounds nice as it removes a possibly tedious and
>> error prone
>> parsing and generating step for the config module and I think JSON
>> is enough
>> of a plaintext format to qualify for a configuration file. People
>> dealing
>> with CouchDB would need to know JSON anyway and for those who don't
>> it is easy
>> enough to read.
>
> As I mentioned before, the INI style configuration is a de facto
> standard and we
> should use it if we can for that reason alone
I'm personally not seeing INI files as a de facto standard, but I
don't care either way as long as things are robust on easy to use. If
INI does that job, it is very welcome.
> I think it is a false argument to suggest that people dealing with
> CouchDB need
> to know JSON - any corporate database will have many people all
> interacting with
> it at various levels. You can't expect the system administrators to
> know or care
> about JSON or to want to use a web based interface for configuration.
Hence my sentence finished with: "… and for those who don't it is easy
enough to read." Any junior DBA should be able to read a key-value
list marked up in JSON. But as cleared on IRC, we are in violent
agreement here.
Cheers
Jan
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