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

[Reini U. <ru...@x-...>]

Matthew Palmer schrieb:
> 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 hoped joby wants to do that, because my time is very limited with 
testing and bug hunting.
It's not really hard to write though.

> 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.

good idea!

> 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?  

clever.

> 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?

yes, I think there were a lot of such minor and dirty changes.
It broke phpwiki.sf.net/demo for a week or so, because we forgot to 
check an important config variable.

We have now config-default values, and the step after reading in the 
options moved from config.php to IniConfig.php:fix_configs().

The names didn't change at all (besides the new global $charset), but 
the logic changed.
So the config.php dumper should check against config-default.ini before, 
do the fix_config() call and then dump it.
-- 
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rurban/