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Comment by rlpb | Hacker News Reader

He says that a config file is half-turing, but an sqlite database can have no turing. Won't this make the configuration far more complex?

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Just wait till someone uses an ORM library for configuration.

But how would one represent a configuration like "don't require auth for /, but do require auth for /foo/*.jpeg" in a table? It would be great to just use a row for each possible URL, but with overlapping wildcards, folder hierarchies and multiple levels of allow/deny it gets very complicated very quickly. Granted, the allow/deny and order that Apache uses isn't great, but at least a configuration is understandable by reading it because the admin can lay out the configuration file with whitespace and comments in a way that makes sense. The equivalent might be achievable in sqlite, but it would be very challenging. It's basically a step backwards towards a poorly featured, confusing GUI configuration mechanism like the old IIS configuration used to be.

well you could always just represent it as:

insert into rules (rule) values('don\'t require auth for /, but do require auth for /foo/*.jpg')

The use of a db is more to create a standard networkable interface for other clients to read/modify the config than a statement about the semantics of the config syntax.

You could do that, but would it really be much different from this?

data = config_file.read()

"insert into config (config) values ('%s')" % data

> But how would one represent a configuration like "don't require auth for /, but do require auth for /foo/.jpeg" in a table?*

Are you confusing offline representation with a runtime structure?

I was only being half serious (or half joking, depending on how you look at it).

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