I found what Appears to be a bug (or two) with initializing variables in Drupal.
It is suggested that you can uncomment and set initial variable values in settings.php with the $conf array. In doing so, and not seeing my variables set when retrieving using variable_get, I discovered that conf_init(), when called to initialize the configure file path, it sets $conf to a string. I know that since it initializes settings.php within the context it conceptually SHOULD reset it to a variable, but it doesn't. I proved this by changing the variable array name in settings.php, variable_get, variable_set, variable_init and conf_init to $config_vars and the values I initialized in settings.php were reflected when my application later retrieved them using variable_get.
This bug is currently hindering the flexibility of an application that I'm writing that will be deployed to different environments. I initially tried to set the variables in the 'variable' table of the Database in order to retrieve them with variable_get but that method only accesses the cached variables in $conf (or in my case, $config_vars. Is this on purpose? I see that variable_set will not only set the cached variable but will also set into the database. This seems to be a bug as well to me. Can someone clarify this for me?
Scott Matthews