Gather all component configurations

[davidbrochart]

It would be nice to be able to gather the configuration of the whole application, from the root component and recursively to all sub-components. I'm especially interested in doing something like this at the command line:

asphalt run config.yaml --help-all

And that would print all possible parameters. Ideally, there would be an explanation for each parameter, but I guess that it would require each component to use Click somehow.

[agronholm]

An interesting idea, but would probably require substantial effort to implement properly.

[agronholm]

I may have to go with a specific validation framework for component configuration. Pydantic v2 is looking like a viable option for that.

[davidbrochart]

If you go with Pydantic, we could take advantage of the fields description to display help about configuration:

from pydantic import BaseModel, Field

class Foo(BaseModel):
    a: int = Field(description="a field")

Foo.__fields__["a"].field_info.description
# shows 'a field'

[agronholm]

Yes, that was part of the plan. I wonder if it would be better to just abstract out the API so it could accommodate other validation frameworks too?

[davidbrochart]

Yes why not, it would be even better.