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

[Michael Wilde]

On 7/13/14, 1:01 PM, Mihael Hategan wrote:
>> - 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.
> We discussed this a few days ago. We had repeated issues with magically
> loaded files from strange locations that the users took a long time to
> find and fix. The solution that I saw in 0.95 was even more search
> locations, which I think was not right.
>
> So the philosophy in trunk is "either it stares at you or it isn't
> there". And includes do this in a way that doesn't sacrifice
> convenience.
>
I disagree with this. The properties search path in 0.95 was carefully 
thought out, and based on a lot of experience with users, even it that 
discussion did not take place on the list.

Unfortunately the trunk commits over-wrote the 0.95 documentation in the 
trunk userguide, but the search path was like this:

Location of swift.properties
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Swift searches for swift.properties files in multiple locations:

1. The etc/swift.properties file included with the Swift distribution.
2. $SWIFT_SITE_CONF/swift.properties - used for defining site templates.
3. $HOME/.swift/swift.properties
4. swift.properties in your current directory.
5. Any property file you point to with the command line argument 
"-properties
<file>"

Settings get read in this order. Definitions in the later files will 
override
any previous definitions. For example, if you have execution.retries=10 in
$HOME/.swift/swift.properties, and execution.retries=0 in the 
swift.properties
in your current directory, execution.retries will be set to 0.


I thought this search path notion was logical, useful, and reflected the 
needs of users and site admins. It was a refinement of what existed in 
Swift going back many releases.

In 0.95 it was tied to the use of run directories (which I hope has not 
been removed from trunk!).

I propose that we re-institute this search path in trunk.

- Mike