Migrating users to new configuration (protocols, bootstrap peers etc.)

[ion1]

When the default config is updated (e.g. protocols or bootstrap peers are added), users need to update their ~/.ipfs/config manually.

Many programs solve the issue by only writing settings that were actually modified into the file, falling back to built-in defaults for settings that are not present when reading.

To see the full config, users are able to run ipfs config show.

Some additonal options for storing a default config for the user to read, each one having some advantages and disadvantages:

• Write the current defaults into the file with keys like Swarm_default, Bootstrap_default and ignore them when reading.
• Use a file format that allows comments and write defaults as comments. (Retaining any comments added by a user while writing new defaults would involve a lot of complexity.)
• Write an additional config.defaults file dumping all the default settings.
  • We could just have an ipfs config show --defaults instead.

Finally, it would be nice to have an ipfs config subcommand that resets a setting to the default value, removing it from the config file.

[jbenet]

thanks @ion1, sounds like a good direction.

We've also gotten requests for:

• yaml as a config language
• cson as a config language
• toml as a config language

(i'm not so sold on changing the format, but conceivable).

---

Also, since the repo is moving most of its contents to be represented as ipfs objects, what we can do is

• store a default config as a (json encoded) ipfs object
• store a "json patch" config (the user's config) as another json encoded ipfs object.

the binary takes the default, patches it with user's and uses that.

[Kubuxu]

HOCON as a superset of JSON designed to be configuration language would be awesome but it looks like there is no implementation for Go.