[Web-SIG] WSGI config, transparency

[Ian Bicking]

Anyway, I'm okay the discussion has died down a bit -- I'll keep working 
on paste.deploy and see how that works out, and revisit this later. 
Right now I'm more interested in how this effects the rest of the "system".

One issue I've come upon is how to make applications and frameworks both 
encapsulated and transparent.  Specifically if I have an application 
which uses a framework, and the framework uses several pieces of 
middleware, I need both *some* of the framework configuration to be 
exposed, and some application configuration parameters to be exposed.

This can continue further when one logical application is composed of 
subapplications.  For instance, imagine I have an admin interface built 
on Subway, with a web frontend in Wareweb, and a WebDAV interface from 
PyFileServer.  The three applications/frameworks can create a single 
logical application.  But how do I present a unified face for the 
application?

With global and flat configuration, the default is nearly complete 
transparency, with some potential for collision.  Without global 
configuration the default is an opaque system, with no possibility of 
collision.  In a practical sense the global configuration is easier to 
get working, and more adaptable for the system administrator.

Anyway, that's the issue I'm thinking about now.  In paste.deploy it's 
kind of handled by:

   [app:someapp]
   set master_setting = foo
   ... include subapp somehow ...

   [app:subapp]
   get some_local_setting = master_setting

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  / http://blog.ianbicking.org