I'd love to see a better way of managing settings in the core of django. It's a real pain point sometimes for writing and using pluggable applications and there's a wide range of ways that application developers try to tackle it. Some have basically no settings, some plan on users reading the documentation and defining all required settings, some have a way of using defaults that can be overridden and some have hacked together ways of using the database for some settings (I think ReviewBoard does something like this, or did). The problem I see is that the *best* way hasn't really bubbled to the surface as far as I can tell. Kind of like how database migrations are a hard problem, settings management seems kind of tricky.
Are there things stopping someone from making a really good app for managing settings and letting that bubble up to the de facto solution like with South? If there are, maybe removing those things would be a good target before trying to build the actual solution in contrib. Of course, this is probably not the best time for discussing this since everyone is trying to get 1.2 out the door, but I'd love to see this area improved down the road. My specific pain points: * With a given app, it's a crapshoot to find where they define their internal settings (some use app/conf/settings.py, some app/conf/ default.py, some app/default.py etc) * It's hard to tweak settings on deployment for different environments. Using a settings_local.py that gets included is a workable solution, but it requires you to maintain a monolithic file. Something like the conf.d/*.conf debian style of configuration might Pinax is having a similar discussion right now. Maybe something will come out of that project that can be applied/adapted to some later version of django. That might be a place to apply some development if anyone is interested in working towards better settings management. http://groups.google.com/group/pinax-core-dev/browse_thread/thread/d9401468ea3c8edf -Wes On Feb 26, 2:11 am, Jared Forsyth <ja...@jaredforsyth.com> wrote: > I have been looking around for a way of managing user-configurable > application settings, and the only solution I have found is dbsettings, > which looks like it hasn't been touched in 3 years. > So, I would like to know: is dbsettings dead? Or is there a different > generally accepted method for having user-friendly app settings? (e.g. don't > require code modification) > > I think that this idea is pretty essential to django's ease of use; there > are many applications which have (or should have) settings which only effect > UI or minor behavioral issues, and shouldn't require a server restart to > effect (and imo shouldn't require server write access). It seems that the > most viable solution would be to have a database managed settings system (in > the form of a .contrib module) which would manage this. It also seems that > having such an infrastructure in place would really encourage app > maintainers to have more settings, thereby making the apps even more > portable. > > Any thoughts? > > Thanks, > Jared -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-develop...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
