Variable Descriptions Knowledge Base

The Envprobe Variable Descriptions Knowledge Base is a sister project to Envprobe which aims to aggregate the settings, such as the variable’s type, about environment variables that are commonly used across the world.

The canonical repository where the knowledge-base lives is available on GitHub at whisperity/Envprobe-Descriptions.

Using this additional information, Envprobe can automatically configure its own behaviour towards a variable from an additional source of information. If the user’s local settings do not contain any setting, and the built-in heuristics do not say anything about a variable, this source will be used.

Note

The knowledge-base is NOT installed automatically when Envprobe is downloaded to your machine. The envprobe config descriptions update command must be executed manually to fetch the initial data, and subsequent updates.

Installing or updating

Execute the envprobe config descriptions update command as shown below. The process is automatic and self-contained, and will update the local copy of the knowledge-base.

$ envprobe config descriptions update
Checking for latest version of the Envprobe Variable Descriptions Knowledge Base project.
Extracting 'default'...
        extracted 7 variables.
Extracting 'python'...
        extracted 10 variables.
Cleaning up old information...
        cleaned up 2 records.

$ envprobe config descriptions update
Checking for latest version of the Envprobe Variable Descriptions Knowledge Base project.
Nothing to update - the latest data is already available.

Contribute to the project

If you would like to contribute to the knowledge-base project, please submit an issue or a pull request. Advanced details about the project’s layout is available in the Implementation reference section.