Configuration (was Re: Constants (was Re: [Nms-cgi-devel] Various Stuff);)

[Jonathan S. <gel...@ge...>]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Joseph F. Ryan wrote:

>
> Tell me; how many of you use constants for configuration stuff in your own
> Perl code?  It's NEVER done.  The constant pragma isn't even used much, and
> that is in the core.
>

I would say that NEVER is a little strong perhaps.  For myself I am
unlikely to ever put configuration in the code itself, and where I do it
is likely to be in some Config.pm with accessor methods to the
configuration items, but 'constant' does have its place when you are
dealing with stuff that really is constant like 'PI' or 'TOES_PER_FOOT'.
We all use manifest constants from modules like Socket or Fcntl and these
are superficially similar to what 'constant' does (Ok, it gets a little
different if you look too closely under the bonnet - but hey, don't do
that :)

What I really want to discuss is the configuration mechanism in its
entirety: with the exception perhaps of the message storage mechanism
employed by wwwboard, the configuration-by-editing-the-program-file is one
of the nastiest legacies from the original code that we seem compelled to
keep; but this, as we have discussed already, is more likely to lead to
error and confusion in the hands of a non-programming 'webmaster' than
anything else.  OK, its agreed that we have to support the possibility of
the end-user upgrading their FormMail.pl or whatever by simply uploading a
new program file with the configuration details changed, but are these
people really that useless that they can't edit and upload a separate
configuration file ?


I'm thinking that for the Green field sites that perhaps we should have an
'NMS COnfigurator' which, whilst it needs to be edited once itself, will
infact write the configuration of all the other NMS programs ...


Train Journey over ... discuss :)


/J\
-- 
Jonathan Stowe                      |
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