Configurations

[Aaron Mulder <am...@alumni.princeton.edu>]

	So I've talked to Alan, David J, and Jeremy at OSCon, and I we've
agreed on a strategy for supporting editing of Configurations.  The
guiding principle is that in the short term we want to support editable
Configurations for the benefit of developers and small installations and
so on.  In the long term, we want to allow the ability to produce and work
with "frozen" configurations for the benefit of larger installations and
clusters and so on.  Even then the process would typically involve a
"Configuration development" period during which everything was editable,
then a "freeze" followed by an export and import to duplicate machines or
nodes.  Also, even a "frozen" configuration must allow certain key
properties to be set.  For example, a frozen web connnector must still let
you edit the network port, so you could install the frozen Configuration
to several nodes of a cluster on the same machine yet still change the
network port so they don't conflict.  So there will have to be some way to
indicate a certain subset of properties within the Configuration that are
editable even after a freeze.

	Anyway, there's much mroe to it than that, which I won't go into 
here, but the path forward looks like this (in order):

1) Allow Configuration editing (change properties, add/remove GBeans, 
etc.)

2) Allow Configurations to be frozen, allow a version number to be
assigned to the Configuration, etc.

3) Allow Configurations to be exported to some intermediate format

4) Allow Configurations to be imported from that format

	Step #1 is a short-term step that I will work on (mainly of 
interest to the web console).

	Jeremy is going to try to get a handle on the specific tasks 
and changes required for Step #2 (it's a bit more extensive that I 
outlined there), and then decide whether it should be targeted for 1.0 or 
what.  If he isn't able to get to this "in time", then Step #2 will wait 
until after 1.0.  Steps 3-4 will in any case wait until after Step #2.

Thanks,
	Aaron