[erlang-questions] Use of application environment

[Adam Kelly]

2008/12/2 Edwin Fine <erlang-questions_efine@REDACTED>:
> I was holding off from replying and hoping to receive more opinions and
> thank everyone at once, but I guess no more are forthcoming. Many thanks to
> you and wde for your input.

I took the decision early in my Erlang learning that individual
servers shouldn't know whether or not they are part of a supervision
tree or an application in order to avoid cyclic dependencies.
Therefore, I call application:get_all_env/1 from my application
module, pass the resulting list to the top level supervisor which
passes the relevant configuration information to each part as needed.
The upside is that this really help with testing as I can easily test
individual gen_servers with different configuration settings.   On the
other hand, it makes changes to configuration settings at runtime very
difficult.

For the one application that needs to be reconfigured regularly, I've
implemented a reconfigure command which rereads the configuration file
and sends messages to the relevant workers informing them of the new
settings.

I'm not sure if this is the best solution in general, particularly
when it comes to core parts of the system that can't really be run in
isolation for testing anyway and it always creates the risk of
accidentally running with old cached configuration info.

As regards upgrades, I tend to assume significant upgrades will cause
crashes, and rely on the self-healing property to do the right thing.
 The system is designed to crash without interruption to service so I
let it do just that.

I'm also very interested as to what approach others take to this issue.

Adam.