I mentioned last post that I was thinking of going with “a config file of some sort.” Plans have formed to use INI format, and the parser is written. (Between the desires to be pure-perl all the way down and to keep embed size down, I didn’t find any pre-written parsers that suited me on CPAN.)

So, it’s probably going to end up something like this:

; we basically just use this for supervisord, no venv needed
[python2]
min_version = 2.7
with_virtualenv = 0

; legacy app can’t handle `carton exec`
[perl]
with_carton = 0

[php]
min_version=5.4

[main]
install = "php perl python2" ; known to fedora-pack
add_packages = "php5-fpm libmoose-perl" ; known to apt/yum

As a bonus, the sections organize the options so that languages can define their own options fully independently, without having to avoid naming conflicts in the CLI options.

fedora-pack will continue to install all the per-language options by default, since actually using them is best practice, as I understand things.