Problem

There are database passwords hardcoded in various places in the codebase and so we can't keep our code in a public repository.

Solution

config_reader

Languages

python, perl, XSLT; maybe bash or java in the future

Design Considerations

XML is the format of the file that holds datbase connection information since it needs to work from XSLT / saxon that connects to mysql via extension function.

The format of the XML matches very closely the structure of the python dictionary django's setting.py requires in django > 1.2.

Using config_reader

config_reader.py has documentation and test built in; test.pl and test.xslt show how use it from perl and xslt.