On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)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.