rconfig

Known Issues

• almost non-existing error handling implemented - unwraps all over the place (that's a question of the implementation not a weakness of the concept!)
• not everything is validated (e.g. unknown TOML keys - that's a question of the implementation not a weakness of the concept!)
• TUI editing is not too good (see below - can be improved or replaced by a GUI)
• code is just prototyping ... I guess it can be cleaned up enough to make it useable in a real project with some effort (or re-implemented from scratch based on this). There is little sense in trying to have perfect code if we don't know yet what we want to build!

Open Questions

• probably we want to merge the TUI (as a feature) into rconfig?
• Have a GUI instead of TUI?
• Rethink "depends" depending on features? See https://github.com/bjoernQ/rconfig/issues/6#issuecomment-2199809818 - probably better to only allow dependencies on (parent) config keys and have an "active-when" to know for which features the config element is for? (Emit warnings when a value isn't used / show in TUI/GUI)
• Are we okay with using TOML to define the configuration? (Obviously we want to use it for ther user's config.) Coming up with our own syntax and parser (based on e.g. PEG) should be easy enough.
• Probably reconsider naming of the user's config (config.toml might be easy to confuse with .cargo/config.toml)

Idea

In your crate's build.rs you need this

    rconfig::apply_config(&PathBuf::from("./config/rconfig.toml"));

A config-definition can looks like this

# something without a type is just a menu item
[psram]
description = "PSRAM"
# dependencies are actually Rhai script expressions which evaluate to bool
depends = 'feature("esp32") || feature("esp32s2") || feature("esp32s3")'

# something with a type is something which can be configured
[psram.options.enable]
description = "Enable PSRAM"
type = "bool"
default = false

[psram.options.size]
description = "PSRAM Size"
depends = 'enabled("psram.enable")'
type = "enum"
values = [
    { description = "1MB", value = "1" },
    { description = "2MB", value = "2" },
    { description = "4MB", value = "4" },
]
default = "2"

[psram.options.type]
description = "PSRAM Type"
depends = 'feature("esp32s3") && enabled("psram.enable")'

[psram.options.type.options.type]
description = "PSRAM Type"
depends = 'feature("esp32s3")'
type = "enum"
values = [
    { description = "Quad", value = "quad" },
    { description = "Octal", value = "octal" },
]
default = "quad"

[heap]
description = "Heapsize"

[heap.options.size]
description = "Bytes to allocate"
type = "u32"
# validations are actually Rhai script expressions which evaluate to bool
valid = 'value >= 0 && value <= 80000'

Note an option can depend on features and/or other options.

The values are available as

• cfg - e.g. #[cfg(psram_enable)] if the value is true or != 0
• cfg - e.g. #[cfg(has_psram_size)] if there is a config value present
• the config values can get included via rconfig::include_config!(); macro (need to also add it as a regular dependency in addition to build-dependency to make the macro available)
  • they are "flat" consts - e.g. OPTIONS_BUFFER
  • also enums get defined via this

The config.toml in the binary crate looks like this

[fake-hal]
heap.size=30000
psram.enable=true
psram.size="4"
psram.type.type="octal"
[fake-wifi]
options.ble=false

TUI

Build ./rconfig-tui and run it in the example crate's folder (i.e. example/example). Probably it shouldn't be it's own crate but contained in the rconfig crate.

It will run a build of the binary crate to learn about the used crates supporting rconfig and how their config-definitions look like.

ESC will exit without saving the changes. S will save and exit the TUI.

Currently support for changing numeric and string values isn't great.

Options

• --fix Ignore invalid configuration keys
  • still launches the TUI
  • you can save the config and have a valid config after e.g. changing features
• --force Don't ask when removing invalid configuration keys
  • currently just disables the confirmation for --init
• --init Create a new empty config.toml
• --features <FEATURES> Features to be passed to the build
• --no-default-features Don't activate default features

While Ratatui is a really nice crate maybe having a GUI instead of a TUI is easier. (e.g. both eGui and Iced are both nice and come with a lot of useful widgets).