[PLUG-Devel] SVN and conf files

[der.hans]

moin moin,

at work we have a code base that has everything hard-coded. Major suckage.
I'm working on fixing it.

We also have recently moved to Subversion, which is good.

We now have dev and prod environments. We might someday get to use the
stage environment as well. The configuration we need to use in each
environment differs somewhat. I'd like to keep the configuration files in
SVN as well since the basic format stays the same, just some of the values
are different.

Any suggestions on a good way to keep the base structure the same and yet
have slightly different values?

I could throw the config files in branches and use softlinks to put them
in place. I fear this would lead to the config files getting out of sync.

I could tokenize the things that change and build the config files in each
environment from a skeleton that's in SVN. Twould be good to have a
trigger hit the build mechanism every time a config skeleton changes. Yes,
require specific OK for the trigger in prod :).

I could come up with a config file format that allows scripting and then
just use programming structure to determine the proper config for the
machine. Yuck.

I could add a config stanza for each machine in the config files and then
use the hostname or environmental variables to figure out which stanza to
use. I guess this would be OK, but again I think it leads to configs
getting out of sync.

I could just get a job at a company that understands and values config
files :). I'd still need a solution to this dilema, though.

Oh, BTW, I need to add config files to shell scripts, PHP scripts, Perl
scripts, Java programs and I'm not sure what language a couple of the
tools are written in, but probably one of those.

Some of the scripts get config info from XML files.

A couple get configs from XML files that override the configs written in
other XML files.

Thankfully our diverse array of Oracle environments were all homogenized,
well except the one in dev disappeared again today...

Our MySQL environments are, um, varied. They copy data back and forth and
are all, in some way or another, different.

Mostly, the DB issues are handled by the configs for the tools, but I
thought I'd mention them in case anybody had any gotchas they wanted to
bring to my attention.

happy happy config config,

der.hans
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