Yes, as the title says, this thread is about app env and it’s closely related cousins config scripts.
Just to be clear, I don’t deny that there’s a thing called system configuration. I just think that app env and config scripts are in most cases an inferior mechanism for managing the system configuration. Moreover, I think that the defaults promoted by e.g. phx.new are arbitrary, confusing, and at the same time limiting.
In my impression, a bunch of stuff ends up in config scripts for dubious reasons, and they don’t even help with actual system configuration (assuming you want to run OTP releases). I’ve been personally confused by config scripts, the team I’m a part of has been confused by config scripts, I’ve seen other people being confused by them, and a lot of libraries promoting them for no particular reasons.
I think we need to strongly challenge this approach, and reevaluate do we really need to promote config scripts and app env so much. I don’t say that they are useless, but I think that in most cases they are not the most appropriate choice. I think that we should instead promote regular code as much as possible, and leave the special code for the few cases where it’s really needed.
