.TH "doc_dev_history_md" 3elektra "Thu Sep 7 2023" "Version 0.11.0" "Elektra" \" -*- nroff -*-
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.SH NAME
doc_dev_history_md \- History 
 
.SH "Elektrify"
.PP
The development of Elektra started in 2004\&. Initially the initiative only aimed at the straightforward idea to unify a configuration access API and a configuration format\&. Elektra started by introducing an API with a few language bindings\&.
.PP
The idea of introducing a configuration access API was not new: Most proprietary software systems already had similar APIs for a long time\&. Nevertheless, it was clear that there was no portable configuration library available to be used for typical FLOSS applications\&. For example, the configuration libraries X/Q/GSettings, KConfig, dconf, plist, and Windows Registry are tied to their respective platforms\&.
.PP
The first idea to improve adoption of Elektra was that the Elektra Initiative itself patches applications to use Elektra\&. This was done, e\&.g\&., for the X Server\&. The maintainers of the X Server, however, had other plans and later improved their software to auto-detect hardware\&. This was admittedly the right choice for them: Elektra would not have been able to help them at that time\&.
.SH "Mounting"
.PP
One obvious limitation of Elektra was that no gradual migration is possible and previous configuration files would need to be rewritten\&. In a first step, we introduced backends, chosen by users at run-time\&.
.PP
An implementation providing only a single backend for the whole system proved to be too limited: Individual applications cannot customize their backends for their own needs\&. We implemented a layer similar to a virtual file system, which enables applications and system administrators to mount configuration files\&.
.SH "Dependencies"
.PP
Furthermore, dependences in the core made Elektra unattractive\&. To solve this problem, we modularized Elektra so that users can select exactly the features they need\&.
.PP
Such changes made part of the software more complicated\&. At first, we provided too little documentation for newcomers to grasp the abstraction mechanisms\&. Then we started to put efforts into rebuilding the community by overhauling documentation, introducing more regression tests, writing tutorials, and designing a new website\&.
.SH "Elektrify: Back Again"
.PP
In the beginning of Elektra, there was no vision how configuration management and Elektra would work together\&. After many years of research, we now have a \fBclear vision\fP how a world with Elektra would look like\&.
.PP
To actually improve the adoption of Elektra, however, configuration management cannot help directly\&. Instead we need applications that depend on Elektra, so that Elektra gets packaged for all distributions\&. We now elektrify KDE, GNOME and XFCE to achieve this goal\&. Furthermore, we are now in the process of doing the last cleanups before version 1\&.0\&.