[Web-SIG] WSGI configuration and character encoding.

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:55 PM 11/30/04 -0600, Ian Bicking wrote:

>We aren't where (mindful) PHP is (or even close), but it's something to 
>shoot for.  This may not actually apply to deployment configuration files, 
>except that it would be nice if cooperative software could be packaged 
>with a deployment configuration file that didn't need editing.  At which 
>point it might as well be a Python script that sets up the necessary 
>objects.  Python can be much smarter about this than any configuration file.

Here's what I'm thinking: paths in the file should be allowed to be 
relative to the directory containing the deployment file, and the 
configuration passed to the application or its setup should include the 
path to the deployment file.  The combination of these two things would 
suffice to allow distribution of an application in a largely 
ready-to-deploy form.  The application could always provide facilities to 
edit its own configuration file(s) or the deployment configuration.

This doesn't mean that some simple apps or middleware won't end up using 
the deployment file for all their configuration needs, but that may well be 
okay for their target audiences.  The key is to have a path to near-turnkey 
installation, if possible.


>Which is why I don't really think deployment configuration is all that 
>important.  It doesn't hurt, but I don't think it should hold up the PEP 
>in any way -- I think the PEP is entirely sufficient as it is, and we can 
>figure out deployment or async or whatever in other PEPs, or in a later 
>revision to WSGI.

Hmm, I seem to recall you arguing almost the opposite about a year 
ago...  ;)  For example, that it was really important for apps to know what 
web server they were running in, and conversely that they expose lots of 
configuration data to the web server.

Anyway, there's nothing really "holding up" the PEP; people are making 
implementations, and we're so far only finding things that need 
clarification, not fixing.  So clearly the PEP itself is in fairly good 
shape.  I probably should block out some time in the next week or two to 
apply the pending updates and write that sync/async/threading primer.

I'd also still like to see a solid async API proposal, and I'd like to 
*make* a deployment format proposal, once I get a few other things taken 
care of.