Hello Scott,
A relative directory is a bit painful as it's not intuitive to what it 
relates to.
The best solution would be to relative to the horde base, but this 
imposes security problems anyway if you don't protect the directory 
with a .htaccess file from outside access. It's not easy to fix as 
horde will not provide an empty file-based  prefs directory by default.

Maybe it's best to prevent relative paths at all to protect users from 
accidentally exposing sensitive preference data? Though this would be 
quite the opposite to what you've asked for... :o)

Thomas

Thank you very much for adding this feature.  Another great use for 
this backend is when your administration discourages databases.

in the config: "Directory to store the preferences in."

It's not quite clear where this points when this path is relative. I 
can put in an absolute path, but I'd like to keep the preference 
system inside of the horde installation for portability.

(I'm not sure if this should be filed separately)

committed, thanks!

Here you go!

Okay, convinced. Please do fix the /var/horde/prefs bit. You should 
look at how the SQL prefs driver acts if it can't connect to the db, 
and do the same thing. Thanks!

Here are some advantages compared to sqlite:

- Loose coupling if you integrate it with another system:
   Easy delete/rename/restore/backup of user preferences
   as prefs are stored as /some/where/##USERNAME##.prefs.
- Scalability: Using sqlite, two or more processes cannot write
   to the same database at the same time. You either busy wait
   or get a timeout in the worst case. No worries with the file based prefs.
- Speed should be equal or faster, but preference data is usually
   very small, so that shouldn't be taken into account.
- We had two cases of corrupted sqlite databases in the past.
- No external dependencies

The /var/horde/prefs thing was just a default value to output an
error message in the log. I'll change that to PEAR_Error if you want.
Though I don't know how the preference subsystem likes me if I do this...

What's the use case for this? I.e., when is this better than using sqlite?

On the code, I haven't looked too closely yet, but /var/horde/prefs 
isn't likely to be a useful default on most systems - you should 
either default to /tmp, or throw a fatal error if the directory isn't 
set.

Patch for horde/config/conf.xml

Hello,

I've implemented a file based preference driver. Attached is the complete file
and a patch for horde/config/conf.xml. Feedback welcome.

Thomas