issue_comments

I agree, settings in the DB doesn't make sense but metadata does.

On the JSON v YAML v TOML issue I just spotted Caddy has a concept of config adapters which they use to resolve exactly that problem: https://caddyserver.com/docs/config-adapters

I do like also being able to set options using command line options though - for things like SQL time limits I'd much rather be able to throw on --setting sql_time_limit_ms 10000 than have to save a config file to disk.

So I'd want to support both. Which maybe means also having a way to set plugin options with CLI options. datasette publish kind of has that ability already:

datasette publish heroku my_database.db \ --name my-heroku-app-demo \ --install=datasette-auth-github \ --plugin-secret datasette-auth-github client_id your_client_id \ --plugin-secret datasette-auth-github client_secret your_client_secret

I'm strongly in favour of combining settings, configuration and plugin configuration.

I'm not keen on mixing in metadata as well - that feels like a different concept to me, and I'm unhappy with how that's already had things like plugin settings leak into it.

I'm not yet sold on TOML - I actually find it less intuitive than YAML, surprisingly. They all have their warts I guess.

Datasette already has the ability to consume JSON or YAML for metadata - maybe it could grow TOML support too? That way users could have a datasette.json or datasette.yaml or datasette.toml file depending on their preference.

In terms of metadata: since that's means to be driven by a plugin hook anyway, maybe one of the potential sources of metadata is a metadata nested object in that datasette.* configuration file. Or you can have it in a separate metadata.json or bundled into the SQLite database or some other plugin-driven mechanism.