In addition to some of the other recommendations here, I thought I'd mention Config::ApacheFormat.

This let's you create your own configuration files that work much like Apache's: you can have global defaults that can be over-ridden in particular locations. If you're working on something web-oriented, this can be a good choice -- why not use something that's going to be familiar to people working on the project?

And in general, I think that's the right way to decide the issue: "consider your audience". For example, I would not introduce XML into a project that wasn't already using it for some reason. On the other hand, YAML seems to map pretty well onto the brains of perl programmers, so if the users of your config files are going to be other programmers, than YAML is a good choice...

But if you're targeting Joe Luser, then you might want something even simpler... though ultimately you're probably going to need to provide some graphical front-end to munge the config file, so machine-readability is even more important -- and that rules out using raw perl code in your config: it's easy for perl to execute, but too hard to parse with another program.

In reply to Re: Config Files in Perl by doom
in thread Config Files in Perl by narashima

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