IfDefine

[Ben Hyde <bh...@gensym.com>]

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
statesmen and philosophers and divines." - Emerson

Brian in <3....@hyperreal.org> writes:
> I believe the configuration file syntax should avoid being procedural - you
> think config syntaxes are hard to debug now, just wait!  mod_perl and its
...
> A procedural configuration file would also become very difficult to
> represent in a GUI.  Anyone know of a good Visual Perl tool?  :)
> 
> I think the config engine should be frozen for the rest of 1.3 to allow the
> GUI efforts to grow, and I think for 2.0 we should examine moving the
> config language to something like XML.

Months later ...
>>    *) Add <IfDefine>..</IfDefine> sections to the core module (with same
>...
>This is going to be very useful in building a test suite; thanks Ralf.

Re: IfDefine

[Brian Behlendorf <br...@hyperreal.org>]

At 11:42 AM 6/16/98 -0700, Dean Gaudet wrote:
>I thought we actually talked more about this and decided that adding
>another namespace was not a good idea.  The suggestion was to use
>environment variables rather than these nebulous defines...

I was going by what was in STATUS.  I thought it was a good idea, so in CTR
fashion I committed it.  If you think we should back it out and rethink it,
I won't be offended.  It just happened to solve a problem I had.

>You know the next thing people will want is #define.  And there's much
>reason to ask for it.  I can put a host specific /etc/host-httpd.conf
>which has a few defines in it and include it from a global httpd.conf, and
>use the same httpd command line on all machines in a farm. 

Go for it.  

	Brian


--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--
pure chewing satisfaction                                  brian@apache.org
                                                        brian@hyperreal.org

Re: IfDefine

[Paul Sutton <pa...@c2.net>]

On Tue, 16 Jun 1998, Dean Gaudet wrote:
> I thought we actually talked more about this and decided that adding
> another namespace was not a good idea.  The suggestion was to use
> environment variables rather than these nebulous defines...

Yeah, that would be great. <IfEnv> maybe?

So you can set things within the config file with SetEnv or conditionally
with SetEnvIf, and you can pass things in from the command line with

  THING=wibble httpd

(instead of httpd -DTHING now).

Paul

Re: IfDefine

[Dean Gaudet <dg...@arctic.org>]

I thought we actually talked more about this and decided that adding
another namespace was not a good idea.  The suggestion was to use
environment variables rather than these nebulous defines...

You know the next thing people will want is #define.  And there's much
reason to ask for it.  I can put a host specific /etc/host-httpd.conf
which has a few defines in it and include it from a global httpd.conf, and
use the same httpd command line on all machines in a farm. 

Dean

On Tue, 16 Jun 1998, Ben Hyde wrote:

> 
> "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
> statesmen and philosophers and divines." - Emerson
> 
> Brian in <3....@hyperreal.org> writes:
> > I believe the configuration file syntax should avoid being procedural - you
> > think config syntaxes are hard to debug now, just wait!  mod_perl and its
> ...
> > A procedural configuration file would also become very difficult to
> > represent in a GUI.  Anyone know of a good Visual Perl tool?  :)
> > 
> > I think the config engine should be frozen for the rest of 1.3 to allow the
> > GUI efforts to grow, and I think for 2.0 we should examine moving the
> > config language to something like XML.
> 
> Months later ...
> >>    *) Add <IfDefine>..</IfDefine> sections to the core module (with same
> >...
> >This is going to be very useful in building a test suite; thanks Ralf.
>