Dear @PaCo and @Alex
Thank you for sharing the plans with the potential move to TS. At the moment, I don't know enough to form an opinion on any move itself.
Fortunately, this is also an opportunity to organise the same/similar set of required configuration in a way that works well for either technology stack: to support hassle-free testing of moving between the two. For TS, I have just come across varlock which promises more secure organisation of env vars.
I began looking at the branch you pointed to (for v7) and made a tiny PR to fix some unit tests (to get more familiar with the developer setup and conventions) thank you @Alex for merging the same. The work to organise the configuration on this branch looks very promising in terms of embracing an approach where the configuration can be merged from env vars.
As I started to get more familiar with the same, I had some more thoughts and I would like to express it on a branch and share the same soon.
Perhaps the user community will continue to adopt and expect the php-core version, both now and in v7 for a while until any move is made. As such, maybe any effort we invest in the automated installation (and configuration) can remain focused on php, for now?
In particular, I would like to "annotate" and organise the configuration some more to clearly distinguish between
A. Functional: this is everything the (non-technical) user makes decisions about, say, for example, locale
B. User technical/semi-technical: this is information that still comes from the direction of the user, but the nature of it is technical information (such as database connection strings)
C. Everything else
From the perspective of automated installation, I imagine a process where we have a short interview (this is something I would do at my museum) with the Keeper of the collections (say, Bob), and the IT administrator (say, Alice).
Bob tells us everything from category A, Alice tells us everything from category B (she may consult Bob for some things, for example, a desired domain name or whether to share an existing database server), and at that point, we would have everything to launch Dedalo for their needs.
From this perspective, it seems there may be a very limited subset of the current configuration that belong to categories A and B. Its possible that Alice does a quick sanity check on some things in category C (such as filesystem locations) to make sure she's happy with them.
I guess this is reflected already in the current interactive installation user journey. More to come soon, once I can express this better in the code ...
Regards,
Krishnan
