[Proposal] Separate xwiki configuration from the XWiki WAR

Hi, For XWiki 1.1 I'd like to separate XWiki's configuration files from the generated WAR. What I mean by configuration files: xwiki.cfg, hibernate.cfg.xml, xwiki.hbm, feeds.hbm and possibly some others. Rationale: 1) It would be nice to release different already made configurations for XWiki: for HSQLDB, for MySQL, for Oracle, with a minimal list of plugins configured, with all plugins enabled, with virtual wiki set up, etc. It's going to be way better to release a single WAR that is the same for all configs and a set of config files separately. This also makes it much easier in the build process. 2) It's currently a little bit of a pain for users when they upgrade their xwiki installation to a newer version. They have to remember to save their config files, to unpack the XWiki WAR, modify the configuration files, etc. What if an upgrade was a simple as dropping the new WAR file in the webapps/ directory of your servlet container? :) Thus I'd like to propose the following strategy: * XWiki looks for where the config files are stored using the following algorithm: 1) first it checks if a system property has been defined (say for example "xwiki.configuration.directory") 1) if not, it checks if a location has been specified in the web.xml file (as an init parameter) 2) if not found, it checks if the files can be found at the root of the classpath (e.g. "/xwiki.cfg") * The standalone distribution contains an already configured directory structure which uses the system property strategy for finding the configuration directory. <further future - but not too far as it's the best solution I think> We should propose a configuration wizard application which is in charge of generating xwiki configuration files. I propose the following distribution channels: - as a webapp wizard configured on xwiki.org. Users use forms to select what they want (which plugin, virtual wiki or not, etc). It generate the files that can be downloaded by the users. Actually this can even be implemented as a XWiki Application... ;-) Eating our dog food they said... - as a webapp wizard released inside the default WAR and that is activated automatically if no configuration is found, i.e. the first time XWiki is started. This is really by far the best I believe. </further future> WDYT? Thanks -Vincent