[PATCH v2 2/2] Introduce conf/config.dev for development

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Tue, 02 Jun 2020 at 08:41:28, Frédéric Mangano-Tarumi wrote:
> > Saying ${AUR_CONFIG}.defaults here is elegant, short, precise and clear
> > to everybody who is familiar with the code base. However, given that
> > those comments are mainly relevant to new contributors setting up a dev
> > environment, I am not sure whether mentioning $AUR_CONFIG is a good idea
> > here (people might not be aware of what exactly it is used for at this
> > point). How about just saying config.defaults, given that the file is in
> > the same directory? While being less precise, most people should still
> > understand which file is referred to.
> 
> Developers need to set AUR_CONFIG to spawn aurweb. If we introduced it
> earlier like \u201cDefine the path to you configuration:
> export AUR_CONFIG="\u2026"\u201d, I think it should fit.

That's better, even though I still don't believe it's more useful than
just saying, config.defaults here. New users might set things up, then
go back to the config the next day without knowing about $AUR_CONFIG
anymore.

> As you implied though, using anything other than conf/config is madness.
> How about making aurweb.spawn set AUR_CONFIG to, by order of preference:
> 
> 1. $AUR_CONFIG, if already defined,
> 2. $PWD/conf/config, if it exists,
> 3. $parent/conf/config where $parent is the nearest parent directory
>    such that the file exists.
> 
> aurweb.spawn is only meant for development, and it spawns test servers,
> so I think it makes sense to use a different default for AUR_CONFIG than
> production.

Sounds reasonable. I would prefer to infer the path from the location of
the script itself (__file__) instead of (2) and (3) though.

> I can replace $AUR_ROOT by YOUR_AUR_ROOT, which is more explicit, and
> remove the comment. In TESTING, we can suggest using the following
> command:
>         sed -e "s;YOUR_AUR_ROOT;$PWD;g" conf/config.dev > conf/config

Sounds good.

> With more motivation, we could add support for environment variable
> interpolation in INI\u202ffiles. aurweb.config would know AUR_ROOT as a
> by-product of finding AUR_CONFIG, if we implement that.

Yeah, probably not worthwhile for just this one use case but something
we might want to look into in the future.

I am not sure what "aurweb.config would know AUR_ROOT as a by-product of
finding AUR_CONFIG" means exactly but note that AUR_CONFIG is usually
not contained in the document root in production setups.

> I meant it to make the SQLite block stand out next to MySQL, but it does
> look special compared to other sections.
> 
> In config.defaults, we use newlines only between sections, but that
> doesn\u2019t leave much room for documentation. Interleaving comments with
> variables like I did below is okay only because the section is tiny. If
> the file grew bigger, I wish the norm was \u201cblock of documentation + set
> of correlated variable definitions + new line\u201d. Sections would need a
> special comment to make them visible, like a ruler or a frame.

I would hope that each section would correspond to exactly one set of
correlated variable definitions, so we would not need this. I am aware
that that's currently not the case though.

> > I think we usually don't add modelines or any other editor-specific
> > configuration.
> 
> Ok!

Thanks!