Sorry I should have explained my thoughts in more detail.

What I'm thinking is that your write your log4perl configs in XML. Log::Log4perl::Config::DOMConfigurator is used in your perl programs that are actually using Log::Log4perl. Then when you want to get at your config elements from somewhere else, you parse the XML with a DTD and an XML parser. That buys you a clean way to get at everything in the log4perl configs.

Of course this is a lot of work and it may be overkill for your needs. However it does "future-proof" you in the case of later requirements causing your home grown parsing to become unwieldy or hard to maintain.