Hi. Our rich ecosystem of packaging tools has a large number of configuration options. In some cases, different tools need to have the same option set in the same way. But we have no common place to put this information and often not even common terminology.
One example is: export-dir (gbp) buildresult (pbuilder) build-products-dir (dgit) build-dir (sbuild) When one of these tools invokes others, it can sometimes pass down an option, but unless we are to have a kind of universal wrapper program, this is not always possible. (And we have too many wrappers already.) So, it would be good for there to be a single way to configure these things. Every tool ought to look in this single place as well as its own configuration. It shouldn't just be an environment variable because that clutters the environment unnecessarily. I think it should probably be a config file in ~, overrideable with an environment variable. (Or perhaps the config filename could be overrideable with an environment variable.) What do people think ? If this is a good idea then we need to agree on a filename and format. The format must be easy to parse in a variety of programming languages including, in particular, shell scripts. Any suggestions ? Also there should be a registry document in some package somewhere, which declares the format and lists the known config keys and their semantics. Thanks, Ian. PS Note that we are talking here about settings which relate to personal preferences, or machine-local setup. Not ones which are properties of the package and which must therefore be done the same way by all of a package's maintainers - that latter information must be elsewhere (in the source package, recorded in salsa, or something.) -- Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own. If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.