rdmd configuration files

[Lodovico Giaretta via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 11 August 2016 at 18:47:05 UTC, Jonathan Marler 
wrote:
> The use case is you have a collection of D scripts within the 
> same directory subtree (maybe a git repo) that all share some 
> common configuration. Maybe they all require extra search paths 
> to find source/libraries, or they all throw exceptions to the 
> user and should be compiled with debug symbols so exceptions 
> print their full stacktrace, etc.  Rather then requiring the 
> user to call the script in a particular way or wrapping all the 
> scripts with yet another tool, what about adding support in 
> rdmd for configuration files?  The configuration file could 
> live in any parent directory of the script being ran:
>
> FileSystem:
>   /a/b/c/myscript.d
>
> Shell:
> /a/b/c> rdmd myscript.d
>
> rdmd checks for /a/b/c/rdmd.config
> rdmd checks for /a/b/rdmd.config
> rdmd checks for /a/rdmd.config
> rdmd checks for /rdmd.config
>
> The rdmd.config file would apply to all rdmd scripts in all 
> subdirectories on the file system.  It works similar to how git 
> determines whether or not it lives in a repository (searches 
> all parent directories for the .git directory).
>
> Additionally, allowing rdmd to be configured through files 
> makes more complicated configurations more reasonable.  For 
> example, if your scripts depend on a dub package, you could do 
> this easily in a configuration file, whereas doing this on the 
> command line would be a nightmare.
>
> Supporting this type of configuration could easily be 
> implemented in a wrapper around rdmd (rdmdc?), however, if this 
> idea is generally useful then it should be added to rdmd itself 
> so everyone benefits.  The question is, is this feature general 
> and useful enough to justify adding to rdmd itself, or is this 
> only useful in rare cases meaning it should live inside an rdmd 
> wrapper?

In my opinion, adding this complexity to rdmd is overkill. When 
you need to use this, IMHO, you should write a little shell 
script that calls rdmd passing the correct arguments. It's very 
easy, just a couple of lines of shell script. Maybe even a 
one-liner.

In file rdmd_wrapper.sh:
rdmd -my-special -command-line -parameters $*

When you call it this way:
./rdmd_wrapper mymodule.d

It will execute this:
rdmd -my-special -command-line -parameters mymodule.d

If you need the same configuration really often, you can add the 
wrapper to the path, so you can call it from everywhere.

But this is just my opinion, many may disagree.