in reply to Re: Re (tilly) 4: using strict and a config file
in thread using strict and a config file
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to want to have more complex data structures in a configuration than just a simple hash.
Also while there are plenty of configuration modules on CPAN, I haven't seen any that I like very much. Here are the main capabilities that I want out of a configuration solution:
- Be able to have any kind of data structure into the configuration.
- Be able to have a search path with selective overriding of configuration information. For instance the development and production configurations should be as similar as possible, with only a few key values being overridden.
- Be able to selectively tie together the configurations of separate modules which should share some common information based on your environment.
- Have checks so that if someone is trying to access a variable from the configuration that isn't there, you can catch it and fix.
Now those wants are not everyone's. Everyone wants to get different things from a configuration module (which is one reason why there are so many configuration modules out there). But I claim that my list is not an unreasonable set of wants for a Perl programmer to have, and if you have them then pure Perl is a perfectly reasonable kind of configuration file to use.