A new Settings API for Drupal

Update, there is an active real project doing much of this: http://drupal.org/project/variable

This is primarily a matter of deployment and developer sanity, but it is also a performance issue: large variables that aren't used on most pages shouldn't be loaded on every page.

The variable table has to change, and we need to distinguish variables that are needed on (most) every page load from those that clearly are not.

Settings we, developers, can split intelligently given an API to do so.

Pretty much every attempt to take on a piece of this issue has crashed on the shoals of it being really ugly what the variable table currently holds and does.

I've started tagging issues as SettingsAPI, http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=SettingsAPI

Efforts

http://drupal.org/project/variable

DX: Use hook_variable_info to declare variables and defaults

https://github.com/tizzo/system_settings

via Catch
http://drupal.org/node/391924 => Use Fields to store text variables, especially those that require text format support => Drupal core, base system, normal, needs work, 12 comments, 2 IRC mentions

http://drupal.org/node/365934 => Handle big texts / module text files / readable and localizable / get rid of _user_get_text() => Drupal core, language system, normal, postponed, 21 comments, 2 IRC mentions

Similar performance issues for schema, theme registry, and field info cache (via catch):
http://drupal.org/node/987768 => Build variable cache over time => Drupal core, base system, normal, needs work, 14 comments, 7 IRC mentions
http://drupal.org/node/1011614 => Use a partial theme registry cache during runtime => Drupal core, theme system, major, needs review, 5 comments, 4 IRC mentions
http://drupal.org/node/402896 => drupal_get_schema() wastes 1-3mb of memory