[Nagiosplug-devel] RFC: Plugins config file (final proposal)

[sean finney]

hey ton,

On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 12:50 +0000, Ton Voon wrote:
> QUOTING IN CONFIG FILE

i think we should be very, very clear on this.  my opinion is that
we shouldn't do any quote parsing/interpretation, and pass what
is given verbatim to the plugin.  so for example

[check_myname]
fullname=Sean Finney

would be the equivalent of

./check_myname --fullname='Sean Finney'

and

[check_myname]
fullname="Sean Finney"

would be

./check_myname --fullname='"Sean Finney"'

and that as andreas suggested, we allow for escaping single characters
with a backslash character (which wouldn't be necessary in any of the
above, but might be necessary for some other reason).

maybe we should just pony-up and do a formal grammar for it?

inifile := (discarded|stanza)*
discarded := (whitespace)*(commentchar freetext)? newline
freetext := [^(newline)]*
newline := '\n'
commentchar := "#" | ';'
stanza := start declarations
start := "[" name "]" newline
name := [[:alnum:]]*
declarations := (declaration declarations) | nothing
declaration := whitespace name whitespace "=" freetext newline

not sure if that covers everything...  for example can a stanza have no
declarations?

> It appears that there is not a specific standard for ini files  
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI_file), so I think to move the  

fwiw, i took a look at the only C implementation mentioned in the wiki
page there, and it definitely will not meet our needs.  specifically
there's no way to iterate across all of the declarations for a specific
stanza (to use the terms given above).  i also looked quickly through
the debian package repository and didn't find any (C) libraries
available for this, though there were some in perl which might work.



	sean
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