[Opensim-dev] Simpler configuration files

[Mircea Kitsune]

This is a topic I wanted to bring up for a while, which I think is an important part of Opensim that may need to be tweaked. In my opinion Opensims configuration files are too many and too complex, and this makes it difficult to maintain your settings especially for newer users. There's too many ini files the owner needs to edit, as well as opensim.ini being too large and a lot of work being needed  to keep your changes between opensim.ini.example updates.

I think the issue has worsened since the config-include folder system, which spreads a part of the configuration to even more files. The settings a user must tweak in order to run Opensim are currently split between three locations: opensim.ini, Regions\myRegion.xml and config-include\*.ini. Imo this is rather difficult to maintain, and I would suggest simplifying the configuration if possible to have it use less files spread to fewer places and without the user having to follow a big file to make changes. I thought about a way to do it and this would be my idea:

config-include would be removed and opensim.ini.example become opensim.ini containing all settings again. However the user would not have to modify anything in opensim.ini, and instead write new settings to a new .ini file (eg: mycfg.ini) which is loaded after opensim.ini and overwrites its settings. Any setting from opensim.ini that the user would want to change he would copy to mycfg.ini with the new value. For instance, if the user would only want to enable "gridmode = false" (for the sake of example) instead of editing it from opensim.ini they would go to the empty mycfg.ini and add the lines "[Startup] | gridmode = true". The order of .ini files to be loaded could be specified in a separate ini file, which would list opensim.ini first and mycfg.ini second.

This would allow the user to keep an updated opensim.ini with all default settings, without having to manually copy everything when updating from the example file. Also they wouldn't have to chase so many lines to find an important setting they wish to tweak, but tweak it from their own little list of settings. There could even be default templates, such as standalone.ini and grid.ini. When the user wants to connect to osgrid, they just select the grid.ini template and change the network settings there, then mycfg.ini would only include sim properties like physics settings. I think a single folder with all .inis would be the best way to go.

Just my idea of it... I know the current config-include system is somehow similar to this, but all of the main settings are still tweaked from opensim.ini copied from opensim.ini.example and the configuration is spread between opensim.ini and the files in config-include instead of being in one place. I'd like to hear more opinions on this, and how and if the configuration of Opensim could be simplified. What do you think?
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. Check it out!
http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_explore_012009
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://opensimulator.org/pipermail/opensim-dev/attachments/20091001/ed9e502b/attachment-0001.html>