LibConf4C

The latest Conf4C news is thus: Conf4C has been torn assunder and rebuilt from the ground up. While I do not normally condone such vicious redesign of the library's interface, the v0.2 interface would not allow enough flexibility to really provide the user the ability the full potential of Guile integration.

With that said only one Conf4C class has been let go, the Conf4CStor. Also, along with Guile comes two additional features. The specification of configuration file format will now be done via regular expressions. Thus the library will not assume as much as it once did, again lending more power to the Guile parsing engine. Also, and currently this is an afterthought, Gettext support will be included in the new version.

This new version of Conf4C, version 0.3, will be released as soon as I can get the time to finish the coding and testing. Once it is at a point where I am happy with it (meaning it is fairly stable on BSD, Linux, (and Mac?) platforms) I will release it along with new documentation as version 0.4. Till then... gobble, gobble.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Conf4C is going back under the knife. It is going to get it's parsing engine replaced by a Guile-enabled version. Meaning that shortly the parsing portion of the library will be 100% extensible and customizable. What impact this will have on the functions for accessing variables is yet unknown but I can assure you that the concepts of 'simplicity and direct-access' will be maintained so that the reading of a configuration file has minimum impact on your code.

Conf4C has been submitted to the GNU organization for consideration for being included and stamp-approved as GNU software. In preparation for this some additional changes will be taking place, such as the possible inclusion of Guile into the Conf4C libraries for parsing purposes.

In addition I will soon be looking for someone to help with the creation of proper build scripts (Makefile.am, configure.in, etc). I'm still new to them and while I do look forward to learning, there is no reason why someone wishing to use the software should suffer my learning curve. So if you are interested and would like to throw your hat in the ring please send me an email with a subject of 'Conf4C Want Ads' to jpbarto at freeshell.org.