Dear GNU people, Many programs use configuration files in sysconfdir (or in the user’s HOME). Bash executes additional shell code at initialization, emacs loads user-defined elisp code at initialization. Many programs use configuration files where each line is a comment, blank, or a key-value pair. Autogen’s autoopts supports configuration files that may look like this. There is also gsettings from glib, but this looks a bit different.
I could understand for a program to be a shell script, source relevant files in sysconfdir and the home, and then execute the real program with extra flags collected from the configuration files. It seems clear that programs that also implement a programming language (bash, emacs, guile) would execute startup scripts in their programming language from sysconfdir or at least the home. What would be the recommended GNU way outside of these cases? Are there known pitfalls to avoid? Best regards, Vivien
