[xwiki-devs] [Proposal] New configuration strategy

Hi devs, I've been wanting to make it easy to upgrade XWiki from one version to another for some time (I'm not talking about XAR upgrade here, that's the extension manager). I'm talking about XWiki configuration files. Here are the use cases I'd like to solve: UC1: Easy install: no need to explode the XAR to install XWiki. See also the comment about xwiki on http://java.dzone.com/articles/file-system-storage-and UC2: Easy upgrade: no need to take care about saving the configuration so that it's not overwritten by an upgrade UC3: Should be possible to have multiple installs on the same machine and running at the same time UC4: Should be possible to control the location of the configuration files for our automated functional tests (so that we control the configuration used) The configuration files I'm talking about are: * xwiki.cfg * hibernate.cfg.xml * xwiki.properties Proposed Solution: =============== 1) Look for a system property (e.g. xwiki.config.dir) defining a directory location and if defined look for the files in it using File IO (I know it's not JEE kosher but it's acceptable IMO). Could be relative or absolute. 2) If not found, look for a JNDI property that gives the location of the config directory 3) If not found, look for config files in [user.home]/.xwiki 4) If not found, emit an error explaining how to configure xwiki 1) solves UC3 and UC4 2) solves UC3 3) solves UC1 and UC2 Note ==== I'm not suggesting any backward compatibility here since it's a new way of configuring XWiki. It means upgraders will need to read the release notes/doc to understand how to configure XWiki. If really needed, we could devise a backward compat strategy, but I'm not sure we absolutely need that. WDYT? Thanks -Vincent