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

[Mihael Hategan]

On Sun, 2014-07-13 at 20:59 -0500, Michael Wilde wrote:
> On 7/13/14, 8:55 PM, Mihael Hategan wrote:
> > But I have never heard one person complain
> > that they have to say -sites.file on the command line.
> The fact that the standard swift invocation line today is:
> 
>    swift -tc.file tc.data -sites.file sites.xml -config swift.properties

Most users would have a run script for this. It's trivial to write, and
hard to make unnoticeable mistakes with it.

> 
> is absolutely insane, and its what 0.95 nicely fixed.

Not insane. Just what you should expect from a command-line tool. Like,
gcc -Wno-write-strings -L/usr/local/lib, etc. 

Having 5 fallback configuration file locations is more uncommon I think.

> 
> Users don't complain - they go find simpler languages.
> 

Maybe. My impression was that it was hard to understand what was
happening behind their backs, which I thought was a somewhat known
problem in design for which the commonly accepted solutions were: have a
single, well specified way to do things, and don't have magical
behavior. 

I'm getting the feeling that you would rather have everything reverted
to what was in 0.95. Let me know if this is the case. It should be
pretty straightforward to do.

Mihael