Am Tuesday 19 October 2004 03:07 schrieb Lluis: > Ok, first of all, sorry if my ideas are not correct, as i'm not sure how > exactly CFG or all the other config system tools work, but as i see it, the > problem resides on two main points, i think: > > - Programs must be modified to use the config system > - Users can't directly access config files without breaking config system's > � coherence
While this seems to be true for many config tools the discontent with this was part of why Config4Gnu (CFG) was started. The config files as used by the app can be accessed in any way and are the only authoritative source for settings. So there is not even a chance to misuse some different representation as a separate registry or so. Specificaly it is never assumed CFG has any authority to modify a confguration, only a user or admin (or scipt/installer run in behalf of them) can have it. CFG does have some information about the configuration a user or admin may like to use and benefit from, though. CFG knows about available options, defaults etc. in a config file from their meta-config definitions. If a config file is accessed directly nothing is broken. Next time the settings are queried from CFG settings might have changed to something other than the default, that was probably the intension though. If the setting isn't known by CFG (for example new CVS version of the app installed) the value is treated transparently as a string. Regards, Christian
