On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
My inclination is that the current model for Configure extension isn't sustainable (manually tracking addition of configuration variables and trying to present a UI for overriding them).
We should start considering migrating most config settings to a queriable configuration database; this can allow new extensions etc to specify their own admin control panel settings requirements, like what we're seeing with the new user preferences.
Attention needs to be placed on ability to cleanly specify group defaults (eg, all wiktionaries get this bit, all Wikibooks get that one), and have a couple different permission levels so eg local admins might be able to make some config changes while others are reserved to system administrators.
I'll toss up a few spec ideas on the tech blog & wiki...
Are you thinking this should completely replace LocalSettings.php? That has serious maintainability advantages (vs. maintaining both separately) and would bring us more in line with other web apps, to be sure. In that case we might want the ability to inject arbitrary PHP code anyway (maybe by file edits, maybe through web interface), in case people want to do more complicated stuff. Also might be good for backward compatibility.