[Swift-devel] Issues to resolve for the 0.96 config mechanism

[Michael Wilde]

I did a quick scan of the new User Guide text that describes the 
proposed 0.96 config conventions.

I feel we need to re-examine the mechanism for backwards compatibility 
with 0.95, and decide on a few things.

- default property file names have changed: swift.properties vs swift.config

- the search path implemented by 0.95 is (I suspect) not yet carried 
forward here, and that needs discussion. My inclination is that it 
should be.

- the include mechanism is new.   I think its nice and likely is very 
useful, but I wonder how it will interact with or supplement the 
property search path.
Did that come from the underlying config classes used, or was that done 
from scratch? We should also consider hos this works with respect to the 
use of cpp in stc, if we see ourselves heading to the use of stc as a 
universal front end for the Swift toolchain.

- as we discussed before, but never resolved - we should decide if the 
documented/encouraged format will have colon separators and quoted 
string values. I prefer the visually simpler format without either, and 
I think 0.95 also allows an optional "=" separator as in standard 
properties files. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.properties is a nice 
summary, and says " Several formats are possible for each line, 
including key=value, key = value, key:value, and key value.")

I think we can work all these issues out as we go.  I'm eager to test 
trunk in its current state before we address any of the issues above. 
Lets concentrate first on manual testing and on getting the property 
names stabilized and the more important semantic changes.

Also, we need to work out issues in application location specifications 
that were started but not yet fully developed in the 0.95 effort.  David 
and I discussed these, and we need to capture and post the 
recommendations that were still in progress for this.

- Mike

-- 
Michael Wilde
Mathematics and Computer Science          Computation Institute
Argonne National Laboratory               The University of Chicago

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