Proposed conventions for IDA configurations

Plugin-Configuration-Standards.md

The Problem

When writing and using IDA plugins, configurations tend to be quite a mess. With each plugin having it's own:

1. Color scheme
2. Hotkeys
3. Configuration file format
4. Configuration location

(And that's when you have a seprtate configuration, and not some variables in the plugin itself).

In the current situation, each developer works as he sees fit, and the users usually end up with the unmodified defaults, as well as a large number of .some-plugin-confuguration files.

The Solution

To solve this, we need to create standards for plugin configuration, as well as C and Python libraries that follow them.

Key Features

1. Configurations should be easily exportable and modifiable (a YAML file might be a good solution)
2. Should allow user/project based heirarcy:
3. Global configuration, stored in the IDA directory
4. User configuration, in the user directory
5. Per-directory config, stored in the same directory as the .idb itself
6. Per-IDB config, stored as net-nodes in the IDB itself.
7. Should allow global-defaults, and per-plugin modifications (like default color schemes for highlighting).

C&C Welcome

If you feel this is relevant to you, please comment so that we can improve on those ideas before going ahead an implementing them.

Regarding the 1024 bytes limit. I find it a bit problematic. The first plugin I wanted to use ida-settings is my plugin-loader. The loader currently holds a list of paths for all the plugins it loads. Paths are naturally long, so the data is easily over 1024 bytes. Any solution that resolves that on the plugin side is bound to be messy.

Any thoughts on that? I am leaning towards letting a JSON dump spread over several nodes.

Yes, I think this is a pretty annoying limitation.

Spreading the JSON over multiple netnodes is the same solution I came to a while back for another project. I have an existing library for netnode access that supports arbitrarily sized values, and handles the allocation of nodes. It would be a good fit for this project, and should solve the issue.

I'll spawn off another project to hold this code. You've provided some great feedback on ida-settings; would you mind giving the new project a review as well? I've enjoyed having a second pair of eyes note issues, suggest changes, and provide logical arguments.