[buckminster-dev] settings working proposal

[Robert Dale <robert.dale@xxxxxxxx>]

In response to bug #168190

There's an immediate need for site credential management for those 
buckminster resources - cquery, rmap - behind protected URLs (http auth 
basic, for example).  But perhaps the scope could be broadened to 
general configuration management.  So I'd like to begin discussion and 
think through some use cases for this.

I can see this broken into two parts: GUI and headless.

On the GUI side, there's already the preferences panel.  Credential 
management would easily fit into that and take advantage of resources 
available through eclipse - preferences store and keyring.  New 
credentials could be added on-the-fly or at any time - similar to how 
subclipse, cvs, etc work now.

On the headless site, AFAICT there is no configuration file, just 
command line options.  So here's where we could potentially broaden the 
scope of a settings file to allow for all the options outside of 
credentials - the existing command line options, some or all of the 
options available in the GUI preferences, interactivity.  Being in 
headless mode, this configuration file would be best suited in text 
(xml).  Where do we put this headless configuration file? 
${user.dir}/.buckminster/headless.xml

So now one potential issue becomes apparent: I have two configuration 
files in two different places.  In my particular use case I primarily 
will use buckminster headless in continuous integration.  Those 
settings, atleast the credentials piece, will be very different than 
what I store on my developer box.  In any case, I think if a button were 
added to the GUI to generate a headless.xml that most problems would be 
taken care of.  It would be a nice template to start out with anyway.

I don't know how eclipse headless works now WRT cvs, svn, etc tools and 
credentials.  What I am thinking is that buckminster would pass them the 
credential information they need to access a resource instead of 
configuring each tool individually.  This would of course be optional.

In headless mode, I mentioned interactivity.  What this means is whether 
or not buckminster will try to interact with you, for example to obtain 
a user/pass.  This could be a command line option as well.

I have been unable to locate any useful information on the keyring 
capabilities and API.  If anyone has any pointers, I would greatly 
appreciate it.

As a starting point for an xml schema...

<buckminster>

  <interactive>true</interactive>

  <logging>
    <level>debug</level>
    <eclipse level="warn" trap="false"/>
  </logging>

  <site>
    <!-- this the url a cquery or a component reader could match on -->
    <url>http://foo.com/private/repos</url>
    <username>jim</username>
    <password>bob</username>
  </site>

</buckminster>

Thanks,
Robert Dale