Yep, I think there should be some included Config behaviour module which handles the serialising / deserialising of a config file, and genservers can register themselves against it, and when the config changes the registered genservers get terminated and restarted gracefully.
I don't think it's very much work - but everytime i try to build something like this I go down this path of trying to work out exactly what the architecture should be like.
Maybe it's a config application you include in extra_applications. How would you tell it the format of the file? How could you do validations?
And then maybe do an escript or similar for configuring it on the fly - something like "elixir_set <variable> <value>"
Re:Why Elixir (2014)
by plainOldText on Friday August 18, 2017 @01:57PM
(#15048342)
I think I fail to see your point. You can fetch any environment variable – e.g. `System.get_env("SHELL")` – and do whatever with it. But distillery has its own way of defining configurations. You can still mix and match.
That's my main complain about Elixir. Releasing and configuring at runtime is a huge pain. I honestly don't see any value in this whole "compile time configuration". If it's at compile time, I can put it in the code. What I call configuration is things I can change at runtime. The fact that something that is a given in any language (config via env vars) requires an extra dependency in Elixir is kind of sad.
Otherwise I love the language, the paradigm and the platform.