Comment by grey-area
4 hours ago
Adding a config setting should never be dangerous (if it is your system is deeply broken) and should be distinct from changing an existing config setting.
4 hours ago
Adding a config setting should never be dangerous (if it is your system is deeply broken) and should be distinct from changing an existing config setting.
> Adding a config setting should never be dangerous (if it is your system is deeply broken)
While I can't name anything specific offhand, I feel pretty strongly that I've seen documentation for various things stating that those things check for an environment variable and, if it isn't present, fall back to other candidate names for the same variable.
This makes setting a new variable synonymous with changing an existing one, unless all variables are currently using the highest-priority possible names.
Another architecture with the same effect is that the software will only check a single environment variable, and if not present it will use a default value. That also makes setting a new variable synonymous with changing an existing one.
Never seen this problem in the wild. Seems like it would be a very rare issue limited to very large configs with conflicting names.
You've never seen software that will use a default value, instead of refusing to operate, when a particular environment variable isn't present in the environment?