As I have been promising for quite some time I finally finished the work to support configuration using a URI. I know almost no one has been active in a long time and this is a fairly large PR but I would appreciate you giving it a look over before I merge it.
Once this PR is applied I plan to go through the other open PRs and apply any I can verify. I also plan to go through the dependencies and upgrade those that I can. This will all take a bit of time as the full build takes about an hour, but as I really need an updated version of Flume for my $dayjob this has to get done. Ralph
