[Zope-dev] ZConfig: a wish list

[barry at zope.com]

As I mentioned, I've been experimenting with Mailman 3 lately, using
ZConfig as the configuration language for basic functionality.  There
are many things I like about ZConfig, but of course I have a few nits.
Since the wiki Fred created on zope.org doesn't (or didn't) seem to
work, I'll post my wish list here.  Feel free to tell me why I don't
really want what I think I want. :)

- import honors prefixy

  In my schemas, I have a number of import statements, each with
  package and file attributes (since the default component.xml naming
  scheme doesn't work for my code layout).  Unfortunately, if my
  <schema> tag has a prefix attribute, import's package attribute
  doesn't honor it, so there's a lot of duplication.  For example:

  <schema prefix="mailman.config.components">
      <import file="databases.xml">
      <import file="domains.xml">
      ...

- $ substitutions in defaults

  Often, my defaults for keys can be expressed in terms of $
  substitutions that are more general for my system.  Unfortunately,
  there doesn't seem to be any way to make this work.  ZConfig itself
  doesn't perform $ substitutions on default values, and there doesn't
  appear to be a way to get at %define variables from Python.

- default sections

  At some point I thought it might be nice to be able to define
  default sections, so that you wouldn't have to require something
  like "<defaultsect/>" in your config file.

- Python command substitutions

  Something like:

  %define hostname socket.getfqdn()

  although I know there are some difficult issues with this (imports
  for one).

- attributes default to type

  When defining a section, if I don't provide a section name, it would
  be nice if the attribute was defaulted to the section type.  E.g. in
  this example:

  <section type="databases" name="*" required="yes" attribute="databases"/>

  IWBNI I didn't have to duplicate the "databases" string.


That's it for now.
-Barry