$Id: config-design 4805 2001-06-21 10:52:27Z rra $ This file is documentation of the design principles that went into INN's configuration file syntax, and some rationale for why those principles were chosen. 1. All configuration files used by INN should have the same syntax. This was the root reason why the project was taken on in the first place; INN developed a proliferation of configuration files, all of which had a slightly (or greatly) different syntax, forcing the administrator to learn several different syntaxes and resulting in a proliferation of parsers, all with their own little quirks. 2. Adding a new configuration file or a new set of configuration options should not require writing a single line of code for syntax parsing. Code that analyzes the semantics of the configuration will of course be necessary, but absolutely no additional code to read files, parse files, build configuration trees, or the like should be required. Ideally, INN should have a single configuration parser that everything uses. 3. The syntax should look basically like the syntax of readers.conf, incoming.conf, and innfeed.conf in INN 2.3. After extensive discussion on the inn-workers mailing list, this seemed to be the most generally popular syntax of the ones already used in INN, and inventing a completely new syntax didn't appear likely to have gains outweighing the effort involved. This syntax seemed sufficiently general to represent all of the configuration information that INN needed. 4. The parsing layer should *not* attempt to do semantic analysis of the configuration; it should concern itself solely with syntax (or very low-level semantics that are standard across all conceivable INN configuration files). In particular, the parsing layer should not know what parameters are valid, what groups are permitted, what types the values for parameters should have, or what default values parameters have. This principle requires some additional explanation, since it is very tempting to not do things this way. However, the more semantic information the parser is aware of, the less general the parser is, and it's very easy to paint oneself into a corner. In particular, it's *not* a valid assumption that all clients of the parsing code will want to reduce the configuration to a bunch of structs; this happens to be true for most clients of inn.conf, for example, but inndstart doesn't want the code needed to reduce everything to a struct and set default values to necessarily be executed in a security-critical context. Additionally, making the parser know more semantic information either complicates (significantly) the parser interface or means that the parser has to be modified when the semantics change. The latter is not acceptable, and the parser interface should be as straightforward as possible (to encourage all parts of INN to use it). 5. The result of a parse of the configuration file may be represented as a tree of dictionaries, where each dictionary corresponds to a group and each key corresponds to a parameter setting. (Note that this does not assume that the underlying data structure is a hash table, just that it has dictionary semantics, namely a collection of key/value pairs with the keys presumed unique.) 6. Parameter values inherit via group nesting. In other words, if a group is nested inside another group, all parameters defined in the enclosing group are inherited by the nested group unless they're explicitly overriden within the nested group. (This point and point 5 are to some degree just corollaries of point 3.) 7. The parsing library must permit writing as well as reading. It must be possible for a program to read in a configuration file, modify parameters, add and delete groups, and otherwise change the configuration, and then write back out to disk a configuration file that preserves those changes and still remains as faithful to the original (possibly human-written) configuration file as possible. (Ideally, this would extend to preserving comments, but that may be too difficult to do and therefore isn't required.) 8. The parser must not limit the configuration arbitrarily. In particular, unlimited length strings (within available memory) must be supported for string values, and if allowable line length is limited, line continuation must be supported everywhere that there's any reasonable expectation that it might be necessary. One common configuration parameter is a list of hosts or host wildmats that can be almost arbitrarily long, and the syntax and parser must support that. 9. The parser should be reasonably efficient, enough so as to not cause an annoying wait for command-line tools like sm and grephistory to start. In general, though, efficiency in either time or memory is not as high of a priority as readable, straightforward code; it's safe to assume that configuration parsing is only done on startup and at rare intervals and is not on any critical speed paths. 10. Error reporting is a must. It must be possible to clearly report errors in the configuration files, including at minimum the file name and line number where the error occurred. 11. The configuration parser should not trust its input, syntax-wise. It must not segfault, infinitely loop, or otherwise explode on malformed or broken input. And, as a related point, it's better to be aggressively picky about syntax than to be lax and attempt to accept minor violations. The intended configuration syntax is simple and unambiguous, so it should be unnecessary to accept violations. 12. It must be possible to do comprehensive semantic checks of a configuration file, including verifying that all provided parameters are known ones, all parameter values have the correct type, group types that are not expected to be repeated are not, and only expected group types are used. This must *not* be done by the parser, but the parser must provide sufficient hooks that the client program can do this if it chooses. 13. The parser must be re-entrant and thread-safe. 14. The grammar shouldn't require any lookahead to parse. This is in order to keep the parser extremely simple and therefore maintainable. (It's worth noting that this design principle leads to the requirement that parameter keys end in a colon; the presence of the colon allows parameter keys to be distinguished from other syntactic elements allowed in the same scope, like the beginning of a nested group.)