ELEKTRA-RELATED() ELEKTRA-RELATED()
NAME
elektra-related - related configuration systems
Settings and preferences are ubiquitous in every software. For this reason, a vast amount
of software has emerged on this topic. Most of the other projects, however, do not devote
their work exclusively to configuration.
Configuration Libraries
We have already mentioned that Elektra provides the features of a configuration library.
There are countless libraries out there that parse and some even generate configuration
files. But there is a big catch: These libraries do not provide an abstract view of con‐
figuration. They require programmers to open the files themselves or at least to remember
the path to them. Such information is itself configuration and inherently operating system
dependent. Therefore, it is not possible to give default values that just work.
Another feature mostly missing in these libraries is cascading. It is not difficult to
implement, but disturbing if it is not available at all or does not work correctly.
Augeas
Augeas is not intended for applications themselves, so it only creates a new view to con‐
figuration files which is not necessarily the same as applications see it. Additionally,
Augeas has a rather poor level of abstraction and many syntactical details must be
reflected in the configuration tree. Nevertheless, Elektra provides an /src/plug‐
ins/augeas/ augeas%20plugin which allows parts of Elektra´s global configuration tree to
be implemented using lenses. Lenses are a promising technology, which allow mapping from
and to configuration files to be specified with a single program.
Uniconf
A project that shares some of the goals with Elektra, but uses a different approach is
Uniconf. Besides a stand-alone library it supports a daemon mode. With the daemon running,
it has the disadvantage of protocol overhead and a single point of failure. On the other
hand, Uniconf can also notify applications when configuration files change and can work in
a distributed mode. The project does not solve the problem of how to configure the config‐
uration system. So we still have to pass a so-called moniker string that contains the
knowledge where to find the configuration. The plugin system is flexible, but does not
depend on the key name. So it is not possible to use different plugins for different
applications and still have a global key database.
Debconf
Debconf is a set of Debian-tools that separates user interaction from the configuration
process for the system´s configuration when packages are installed or upgraded. Debconf
itself does not change the configuration files. Instead, the administrator is asked ques‐
tions depending on template files using different front ends. These answers are then
cached. The configuration changes themselves are applied by post-install scripts of the
particular package. Exactly for this last step Elektra could yield much better results,
because it can compare configuration on a per-key basis and thus handle conflicts in a
much more fine-grained way.
Freedesktop.org
The freedesktop.org initiative unifies different desktops using the X Window System in
various ways. The main focus, however, lies in KDE and Gnome integration. One of the most
disturbing and still unresolved problems is configuration. Elektra intends to fill this
gap in the future.
Already available is the so-called XDG Base Directory Specification. Perhaps it will
define file formats in the future, but currently only the paths are specified. To do so,
it introduces some environment variables that help to find the actual configuration. Only
if they are unset or empty, a built-in fallback should be used. If desired, elektrified
applications behave in a XDG conforming way. (See the configuration x for the resolver
/src/plugins/resolver/).
July 2017 ELEKTRA-RELATED()