Overview of the Elektra Initiative

From Elektra Initiative

Elektra is a universal hierarchical configuration store, with related goals like GConf and the Windows Registry. It allows programs to read and save their configurations with a consistent API, and allows them to be aware of other applications' configurations, leveraging easy application integration. The whole point of it is to tie applications together, so that they can co-operate and share their user-preferences.

The developers are associated to unix philosophy and the very practical point consists of writing a configuration library. Every software needs this functionality, it is not easy to do it right and performant and we want to avoid any unnecessary code duplication.

major focal points

API implementation to access the key/value pairs namespace with a variety of Backends and Bindings
Definition of a standard key/value pair hierarchy, namespaces and semantics
Produce quality patches for popular softwares as X.org, Samba, KDE's KConfig XT and Gnome's GConf

pursuing material

Elektra includes a Library, an API detailed describing the functionality, plus command line and GUI tools for administration tasks.

It is designed to be lightweight, with no dependencies, ready to be used also by early boot stage programs.

Using Elektra, configuration file's syntax and handling will not be a rework for each software.

For a fast graphical overview of Elektra, check our OpenOffice.org presentation (german). Also browsable (without animations) in an HTML-exported version.

For a practical start see GetStartedMounting or Tutorial.