[Phpwiki-talk] Automatic config rewriter php -> ini

[Matthew P. <mp...@he...>]

Has anyone made any progress in this area?  The major hold-up for me
updating Debian to 1.3.1[01] is that it'll force every PHPWiki user in
Debian to rewrite their config files, which is unlikely to make them jump
for joy.

I did have one (potential) brain-wave, which would also, as a side-effect,
solve the major cause of complaint against the ini-file system.  Put
together code which parses the INI file and writes a config.php full of
define()s and whatever else takes your fancy, and source *that* instead of
doing an INI parse every invocation.  Then, just have a bit of code that
compares the mtime of config.ini with that of config.php, and rewrite
config.php if it's older than config.ini.  The first user to hit the new
config file gets a 1-2 second slowdown, maybe, but that can be server lag,
and everyone else gets smokingly fast response times.

This also means that I can continue (more or less) to let Debian users work
on their config.php files directly if they have to, and switch to config.ini
when it suits them.  This, of course, pre-supposes that the defines and such
for 1.3.10 are very close to those of 1.3.7, but I was careful to leave as
much of it intact as possible.

Does this sound like a monumentally stupid, or clever, thing?  I haven't
been tracking the addition / renaming of config items, which is the big flaw
in my plan.  Reini, has there been that much modification to the system such
that 1.3.7 config.php files would have no chance of working in 1.3.10?

- Matt