How to learn about all those configuration file values?

[Kevin Krammer]

On Sunday, 2013-04-07, Stephen Dowdy wrote:
> Kevin Krammer wrote, On 04/07/2013 03:34 AM:
> > A lot of application config are nowadays described by a meta config file,
> > file extension being .kfcg
> 
> ------------------^^^^^
> 
> > They are used to describe all possible values, their types and defaults
> > and are used to generate config access code instead of manually writing
> > it (manually written config access code is prone to typos in setting
> > names).
> 
> ------------------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Kevin,
> 
> Heh, Irony Oops! You typo'd the file extension (.kfcg) should be
> .kcfg (that sequence of letters is always a tough one)

Haha, indeed :)

> $ kde4-config --path kcfg
> /home/sdowdy/.kde/share/config.kcfg/:/usr/share/kde4/config.kcfg/
> 
> While i'd just sort of discovered these in looking in more depth in
> trying to determine where these might be found, i never even noticed
> that there was a 'kcfg' path, and hadn't looked in detail...

Ah, I hadn't thought about that either.

> > But as a side affect the also provide a kind of documentation of the
> > application's configuration capabilities.
> 
> Yep, cool.. (where's 'kxmleditor' when you need it? anybody know of
> a good replacement XML visualization tool? )

I usually just open in Kate and switch highlighting manually to XML.
Could be interesting to create a Kate highlighting file specifically for kcfg 
though :)

> So, i presume these files are simply compile-time reference material
> when placed in that directory, and are not runtime referenced by the
> application. (i.e. it's going to be up to the "distro" maintainer to
> ensure they get put there so the average user can reference them, to
> see what key values may have been default-overridden at compile-time
> in the packaging.)

Right.
They are only required a compile-time but my guess is they are installed for 
documentation purposes, like what we are discussing here.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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