[Rails-devel] New configuration system

[Stefan F. <ste...@we...>]

I have rewritten the Configuration system for rails.

I intend to release 1.7.0 today, so it would be great to get some 
feedback soon if the OS specific storage solution works without hassles 
for Windows and Mac

Stefan

Major changes:

There are two major changes for users:

* The configuration settings are stored in OS specific directories:

A) Unix-Systems (except Mac):
~/.rails (with ~ equals content of system property user.home)

B) Mac OS-Systems: ~/Library/Preferences/net.sourceforge.rails
(again with ~ equals system property user.home)

C) Windows-System:
First it tries to locate the common application data folder (something
like C:\\Documents and Settings\\username\\Application Data). There it
uses the subfolder rails.
This is done using System.getEnv("APPDATA").

If this fails the user directory is found using
System.getEnv("USERPROFILE"), as user.home has a known unfixed bug on
Windows system (see http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=4787931

* The profile system is (hopefully) easier to use now:

There are predefined profiles: pbem equal to the previous default) and 
prettyUI and ORDocking.

If a user changes the settings and wants to apply them, the new profile 
will be stored inside the configuration folder and will be available for 
selection (in addition to the predefined) at the next start.

* Internally it was rewritten from scratch and the profiles are a tree 
which has the root profile at the top. All profiles below only store the 
delta to its parent.

User profiles will always link to a predefined profile as a parent to 
avoid users building deep structures.