In an attempt to keep database passwords out of revision control, a multi-lingual library to read database connection information from a common file has been created.
There are database passwords hardcoded in various places in the codebase and so we can't keep our code in a public repository.
config_reader
python, perl, XSLT; maybe bash or java in the future
XML is the format of the file that holds datbase connection information since it needs to work from XSLT / saxon that connects to mysql via extension function.
The format of the XML matches very closely the structure of the python dictionary django's setting.py requires in django > 1.2.
config_reader.py has documentation and test built in; test.pl and test.xslt show how use it from perl and xslt.