From Elektra Initiative

• It is much more an agreement then a piece of software. Relation is 99% to 1%.
• It is a simple and consistent API to help software developers programatically store and retrieve global and user-specific configuration parameters.
• All key-value pairs are stored in clear-text files, UTF-8 encoded. All old charsets are also supported, with automatic transparent conversion to and from UTF-8.
• API supports change notifications and multiple backends.
• It provides a unique namespace for all values. Anywhere, anytime, any program can preciselly access keys by their names. Security restrictions may obviously apply.
• It is designed to be secure and lightweight, to let even early boot-stage programs like /sbin/init to use it, instead of /etc/inittab file.
• It is designed to be easy to administrate with regular command line tools like cat, vi, cp, ls, ln. Its storage is 100% open.
• It tries to set distribution-independent naming standards to store things like hardware configuration, networking, user's session configuration, system's mime-types, parameters for kernel modules, etc, that are generally stored under /etc.
• It requires existing software to be changed to use its API. This will substitute hundreds of configuration-text-file parsing code, into clear Elektra's API key-value access methods.
• It is POSIX compliant. If it doesn't compile and run easily on some POSIX system, it should be easily modified to do so.