[development] low hanging fruit for Drupal 6: variable defaults

[Gabor Hojtsy]

Greg Knaddison - GVS wrote:
> On 5/3/07, Gabor Hojtsy <gabor at hojtsy.hu> wrote:
>> **We need a central place to define variable defaults**
> 
> Why can't that central place be the variable table?
> 
> We could remove the second argument to variable_get and refactor some
> code to do the variable_set at install time which eliminates the need
> for the defaults in the variable_get() calls themselves.
> 
> add1sun recently contributed a patch to pathauto that did this.  The
> reason it's needed in pathauto was the use of variable_get's that
> involved variable variable names (e.g. variable_get('pathauto_'.
> $something .'..., '') which had empty defaults and the code did
> nothing if the variable came back empty.  To make sure pathauto worked
> without submitting the settings page, it now sets variables in
> hook_install.
> 
> Couldn't all modules do that? Then we eliminate the second argument to
> variable_get, create the centralized place to define variable defaults
> as you wanted, but need no new hooks and no new module_invoke_all and
> no new caching of "yet another variable system".
> 
>> Don't care yet about how this fits into translatable variables, because
>> we can only follow up on that if this gets done. So someone please grab
>> this issue and run with it ;)
> 
> The tasks would be fairly simple:
> 
> 1. Modify variable get to take one argument
> 2. Find all variable_gets and their corresponding default, move the
> default to an _install
> 3. Document it on the update/modules page
> 4. Rejoice
> 5. Console killes
> 
> I'd be happy to run with that if people like the approach.

Indeed, makes a lot of sense to me. I'd be glad if you could run with 
this and submit a patch. But wait for more positive reactions first :)

Gabor