Design patterns/guidelines on creating application/product configurations

I was wondering if there are any design patterns, best practices, guidelines or documented widsom/best practices for creating 'application configuration' structure, data, and files. I realize this questions has been partially touched in some posts but I hope this questions questions the topic from another angle.

• Basically what kind of analysis goes into creating the configuration structure?


• What analysis needs to take place?


• What kind of forces are at play that one needs to consider?


• When does application configuration analysis/creation come into play; is it an after-thought or followup to the main design activity or interdependent with the main development flow?


• What pros and cons for structuring configuration data in one way rather than another.


• What kind of requirements needs to be captured or aware of (flexibility, override capability, lack of duplication, selection, ...)

Specifically my interest in in developing the hierarchy of configuration settings.

Are there any actual projects out there with sufficient level of sophistication whose configuration could be studied?

My question is not aimed at format or type of files (whether to use flat ini, or json, xml, ...) but at how to arrive at configurations in the first place.

Thanks