Notes on the IPython configuration system
This document has some random notes on the configuration system.
To start, an IPython process needs:
- Configuration files
- Command line options
- Additional files (FURL files, extra scripts, etc.)
It feeds these things into the core logic of the process, and as output,
produces:
There are a number of things that complicate this:
- A process may need to be started on a different host that doesn’t have
any of the config files or additional files. Those files need to be
moved over and put in a staging area. The process then needs to be told
about them.
- The location of the output files should somehow be set by config files or
command line options.
- Our config files are very hierarchical, but command line options are flat,
making it difficult to relate command line options to config files.
- Some processes (like ipcluster and the daemons) have to manage the input and
output files for multiple different subprocesses, each possibly on a
different host. Ahhhh!
- Our configurations are not singletons. A given user will likely have
many different configurations for different clusters.