This is a multi-language package for handling configuration files in a flexible, maintainable, language-agnostic way.
Currently, this package supports implementations in C (plain old C) and Perl. More languages may be added in the future.
For the end user, i.e., for the contents of config files, it should make no difference which programming language the application uses. For the application developer, the interfaces to the various supported languages should feel as similar as possible, given the different environments those languages provide.
This project offers flexible processing of Windows-style configuration files, a.k.a. INI files, including the usual features like sections and comment lines. Several such configuration files may be processed in sequence, where entries read later may override entries of the same name read earlier. In this way, larger projects may provide shared configuration files containing general information and default values, which can then selectively be used, augmented, and overridden for sub-projects by their own configuration files. The additional configuration files can be named programmatically by the developer, or the configuration files can dynamically include other configuration files.
An important feature is that values can include placeholder markers which will be resolved dynamically at runtime using the contents of other entries. Specifying non-existent configuration files is deliberately not treated as an error. Accessing non-existent keys is handled gracefully.