[Zope-Coders] New API for Zope configuration info

[Lennart Regebro]

Chris McDonough wrote:
> As far as backwards compatibility goes, envvars are (somewhat
> unfortunately) "the tip of the iceberg".  It would be slightly
> disingenuous of us to provide envvar support for b/c reasons when all of
> the rest of the supporting install/startup machinery has changed (no
> "z2.py", no "start" script, no "wo_pcgi.py", etc.).  With the changes in
> the pipe, we're either going to need to create a "compatibility layer"
> that makes 2.7 install/startup look a lot like previous 2.X
> incarnations, or folks will need to cope with the differences as best
> they can.  That said, the new install and startup scheme is much better
> than the old (I suspect it will actually make sense to most people ;-)

I'm +1 on scrapping environment variables completely.


A small thing that popped up in my brain is the possibility of having 
global configuration files. At least for unix, located in /etc/zope or 
somesuch. The order could then be:

   1. command line
   2. local configuration file
   3. global configuration file
   4. intrinsic default

That way you could set up anything you want changed from default on all 
servers in one place.
I'm not sure this makes much sense at the moment, there isn't that much 
to configure yet. And besides, it would be nice with a way to globally 
override all local defaults too. :)