[Opensim-dev] Supporting shell environment variables

[BlueWall]

Hi All,

About a year ago, I was working on the Fortis-OpenSim project and had 
started digging into the configuration system a bit. One of the things I 
wanted to to was provide the means to interact with shell environment 
variables during the configuration. So, I studied the insides of Nini 
and added support for the environment variables in a way that lets it 
deal with the shell environment like already interacts with 
ini/xml/registry configuration media. I tried contacting the Nini author 
to ask if they would incorporate the changes into their distribution, 
but Nini development has been dormant for some time and I never got a 
response.

A few days ago, I had a conversation in IRC about environment variable 
support and decided to look at putting it into OpenSim. And today I was 
able to use the modified Nini to get it working. I have done some 
testing here and it works well. I want to push this to core, but I 
wanted to discuss the forking of Nini. How does everyone feel about 
that? I think having the ability to manipulate shell variables is pretty 
good for us, and seeing that the Nini development has been dormant so 
long it shouldn't be as much of an issue. If development starts back up 
on it, then I'm pretty sure we could get the changes into the 
distributed version.

Thanks!
BlueWall

PS: for reference - http://pastebin.com/f3R0sk5N