Ideas for streamlining configuration

General
1

Merge config files

I found that there is some overlap between the config files of broker and dbproxy. At least with the auth configuration, I have the impression that it is rather arbitrarily split between the two files. Could they possibly be joined together?

Look up config files in well-known path(s)

Working with the basebox binaries would be easier if the --config-file parameter was optional. I’d suggest to scan $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/basebox/{bin}.toml (where {bin} is the name of the binary: dbproxy or broker, or possibly basebox or config if the two were joined).

There are more paths like /etc/basebox/ that could be scanned as well, but I think this is not necessary at this point. Searching multiple paths would create the need to merge multiple existing configs, which I assume is just too much work for too little gain.

2

You are right, there is some overlap; this is due to the fact that broker and dbproxy usually run on different machines. We could merge them and run both binaries with the same config file, ignoring irrelevant stuff. We’ll discuss this here.

Concerning automatic lookup of config files: we will also discuss this, maybe you can describe how this would make handling easier. In general, I am not a fan of such things being handled implicitly; e.g. if I need to know what config file is in effect, I can look at the ps ax | grep broker output.