Configuration file fixes with includes#4250
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ethomson merged 7 commits intolibgit2:masterfrom Jul 19, 2017
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As ever so often, this PR has grown quite a lot again as several other issues have popped up :P So I've started refactoring our configuration includes code to be easier to maintain and fix these bugs. I hope that these refactorings might ease further improvements alongside with include files,for example when modifying variables in the correct config file. But yeah, I'm done with that code for now, not to keen on revisiting it too soon 🙂 |
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Any plans when this gets merged? |
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While I'd like to get it merged soon-ish, I won't merge without some thorough review as it touches quite some internals of how we handle config files. So doing reviews would definitly accelerate getting this PR ready. |
Current code for configuration files uses the `reader` structure to parse configuration files and store additional metadata like the file's path and checksum. These structures are stored within an array in the backend itself, which causes multiple problems. First, it does not make sense to keep around the file's contents with the backend itself. While this data is usually free'd before being added to the backend, this brings along somewhat intricate lifecycle problems. A better solution would be to store only the file paths as well as the checksum of the currently parsed content only. The second problem is that the `reader` structures are stored inside an array. When re-parsing configuration files due to changed contents, we may cause this array to be reallocated, requiring us to update pointers hold by callers. Furthermore, we do not keep track of includes which are already associated to a reader inside of this array. This causes us to add readers multiple times to the backend, e.g. in the scenario of refreshing configurations. This commit fixes these shortcomings. We introduce a split between the parsing data and the configuration file's metadata. The `reader` will now only hold the file's contents and the parser state and the new `config_file` structure holds the file's path and checksum. Furthermore, the new structure is a recursive structure in that it will also hold references to the files it directly includes. The diskfile is changed to only store the top-level configuration file. These changes allow us further refactorings and greatly simplify understanding the code.
Previously, the callbacks passed to `config_parse` got the reader via a pointer to a pointer. This allowed the callbacks to update the callers `reader` variable when the array holding it has been reallocated. As the array is no longer present, we can simply the code by making the reader a simple pointer.
The backend passed to `config_read` is never actually used anymore, so we can remove it from the function and the `parse_data` structure.
Currently, we only re-parse the top-level configuration file when it has changed itself. This can cause problems when an include is changed, as we were not updating all values correctly. Instead of conditionally reparsing only refreshed files, the logic becomes much clearer and easier to follow if we always re-parse the top-level configuration file when either the file itself or one of its included configuration files has changed on disk. This commit implements this logic. Note that this might impact performance in some cases, as we need to re-read all configuration files whenever any of the included files changed. It could increase performance to just re-parse include files which have actually changed, but this would compromise maintainability of the code without much gain. The only case where we will gain anything is when we actually use includes and when only these includes are updated, which will probably be quite an unusual scenario to actually be worthwhile to optimize.
Right now, we have multiple call sites which initialize a `reader` structure. As the structure is only actually used inside of `config_read`, we can instead just move the reader inside of the `config_read` function. Instead, we can just pass in the configuration file into `config_read`, which eases code readability.
Modifying variables pulled in by an included file currently succeeds, but it doesn't actually do what one would expect, as refreshing the configuration will cause the values to reappear. As we are currently not really able to support this use case, we will instead just return an error for deleting and setting variables which were included via an include.
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This fixes the issues causing #4247, but it does not yet fix additional issues with includes. One more issue I found was that upon refreshing a config file, we'll duplicate the includes inside the readers struct, if I'm not mistaken. I'll try to tackle this problem tomorrow, alongside with some tests for the broken behaviour.