[Zope-Coders] Environment variables

[Tres Seaver]

On Mon, 2002-04-29 at 15:09, Matt Behrens wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 29, 2002 at 01:21:30PM -0400, Tres Seaver wrote:
> 
> > If we use ConfigParser (as Matt is working on), then each "section"
> > within the config file will correspond to a "namespace" for options;
> > using the namespaces from the environment or the command line might
> > be a bit tricky;  perhaps we should marshal them using ':record'? :)
> 
> Command-line is easy, if you do the "-o" example I posted some time
> back, i.e.
> 
> zope start instance -o ZServer.HTTPPort=80 -o ZServer.ICPPort=1234
> 
> etc.  These would correspond to HTTPPort and ICPPort under the
> [ZServer] section, for example.
> 
> Environment; I don't know how you'd do that.  Is that an absolute
> must to support?  I guess I can see how it'd be useful, but if it
> were me, I'd just backup and edit my instance.conf :-)

We have dueling requirments here:

  - In steady state, system administrators want absolute
    predictability;  they don't need / want environment variables or
    command-line options at all, *once the config file is correct*.

  - Developers, and sysadmins who are working out the correct
    configuration for their site, need to be able to restart the server
    tweaking settings and testing.  Environment variables and
    command-line options address this problem.

We could add namespaces to environment variables, e.g.:

  ENV_VAR="Namespace:Value"

Tres.
-- 
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Tres Seaver                                tseaver@zope.com
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