To avoid rehashing a lot of discussion that has already taken place, please review the following thread as well as this one. Most of this has already been hashed out.
The tl;dr is:
- there needs to be a migration path for users to move from GUI based to text based
- this requires changing the format of .items and .things (eventually .rules) files because there is no library to write out files in their current formats
- there needs to be “one source of truth” for the configs (we now have two)
- the UIs need significant improvements to make create/copy/edit/paste of stuff through the UIs more closely approach the ease of doing so in text config files
It think the consensus from that thread was there would some sort of import/export tool that can be used to read in files of some standard format on request (not file system polling) and create the necessary entries in the JSONDB (one source of truth) and a way to export from the JSONDB back to files of some standard format.
There was talk of being potentially being able to support multiple file formats with an approach like this.
And the UI improvements need to be made regardless.
This was my understanding. I could be mistaken.