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Introducing libeconf

Introducing libeconf

Bringing systemd-like configuration layering to everything else

Track: Distributions devroom
Room: K.3.201
Day: Sunday
Start: 14:00
End: 14:25

systemD has a very distribution-friendly way of providing it's configuration, with distributions providing defaults in /usr and users being able to override things either selectively or entirely with their own files in /etc. This is especially nice for distributions wishing to be in some way stateless, support a read-only root filesystem, or provide some kind of factory-reset. libeconf is a newly written C library to ease the adoption of similar configuration layering in other programs across the Linux ecosystem.

This talk will give a brief introduction to libeconf, how to use it in your existing programs and demonstrate some examples that have already adopted libeconf (eg. PAM, util-linux, rebootmgr, etc).

The session will also share some future plans and welcome suggestions for future contributions, especially for additional features, language bindings, etc.

The target audience is primarily developers of 'low level' distribution plumbing (eg. core daemons & services, package managers, etc) that are most likely to benefit from libeconf, but might be of interest to anyone developing any service for linux distributions.