Future of configuration

Since Dean just raised the question in gui-dev about "what are ya'll up to" I thought I would post back to this list a brief synopsis of what the 2 or 3 active persons are working on since it is somewhat relevant to discussions about config file syntax.

Justin Seiferth and Roman Baron have been working on a Java based configuration frontend that Justin originally showed us some time back. http://butler.disa.mil/ApacheConfig/

My main feedback to what is going on in this list has been an attempt to find a common ground protocol that we can give to any interface developer which would allow any number of text based, Java, Tcl, etc. interfaces and should provide us some portability to other platforms like Win32.

SNMP seems to me to be the logical choice here as there has been an HTTP MIB under development that I think Harrie Hazewinkel has been involved with. I've not had success reaching Harrie to get his feedback on SNMP issues. Perhaps Dirk knows what's up with Harrie?

As for how this relates to current discussion about added directives and other configuration languages, I _personally_ think that abstracting the configuration language out of the core would be a good thing. Adding SNMP to manipulate the servers configuration data directly would offer a rather standard API that could even be portable to other web servers given that they could adopt the same public standard. Feedback from Harrie on this issue would be very helpful.

Given a config API to work with, I personally relish the idea of a telnet accessed config using similar syntax to that of a cisco router.

On disk storage formats could then be optioned to:

• SQL database
• DB format
• current text format
• Win32 Registry format (god help us)
• etc.

Obviously all 2.0 issues.

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In a nutshell. Comments solicited.

-Randy Received on Mon Aug 18 07:40:31 1997