devchat notes 05-Sep-2017

[Lukas Pirl]

Dear all,

On 09/19/2017 07:39 AM, Brian Warner wrote as excerpted:
> * switching config from (tahoe.cfg, yaml files) to single sqlite DB

What is the motivation behind this? As a (small-scale, part-time)
sysadmin, this sounds not too attractive to me. Most of *NIX tools
survived the last decades with plain text config files quite well, no?

Structured plain text files (e.g., YML and INI)
* are effortlessly machine-modifiable (libraries, Ansible, …)
* are human readable/editable, if required
* behave well in VCS
* can be written atomically, if that is a concern.

>   * might be one-or-the-other
>     * 1: text-based human-editable never-machine-modified config file
>     * 2: binary non-human-editable always-machine-modified config
>          file
>       (sqlite, provide config-editing tools)

Again, I don't see the concerns speaking against text-based human- and
machine-modified config files.

>   * meejah really likes ephemeral config: no state on disk

That, on the other hand, sounds very interesting. :)

Cheers,

Lukas