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Hieropt is a simple, hierarchical configuration library.

Simplicity is important because complex configuration is rarely worth
the time.  Hieropt supports a simple file format: "name: value" or
"name = value", with whole-line comments beginning with "#".  Basic
types String (hieropt.Value), Bool, Int, and Float are provided, but
users can provide their own types to convert raw strings to typed
Python values.

Hierarchicality is useful because it allows modules to define their
own hieropt configuration which can then be easily integrated into an
application's hieropt configuration with one method call.  Two
applications using hieropt can be joined into one umbrella application
with ease.  In short, hieropt configurations are *composable*, which
is important for the development of modular software.

Hieropt groups can read configuration values from files and from
environment variables directly; it can also produce or modify an
optparse parser to accept configuration values on the command line as
well.

Hieropt supports the documentation of configuration variables and
groups for creating annotated configuration files and providing
command-line help.

For a usage example, see conf.py in the finitd project: 
http://github.com/jemfinch/finitd/blob/master/finitd/conf.py  In that
file you can see some user-defined types and the basic way to use the
library (defining a module/app-level group, then registering values
with it.

See the docstrings for better API documentation.