Allow overrides without `.`

[adrianeboyd]

Mainly as a note for the future because it came up in the check_requirements overrides for spacy project:

Is there a technical limitation that requires confection to only support overrides that contain . or could this be removed to also support top-level overrides?

[rmitsch]

Context: explosion/spaCy#11735.

I had a look and bypassing this wouldn't be trivial. Config values without sections (such as check_requirements) are not supported by confection, as they are parsed as improperly formatted. This comment provides motivation.

So while possible, it would be a redesign of how sections are processing by confection. I agree that it's not satisfactory not being able to override top-level properties. I'm inclined to say that this is probably not worth it though (maybe I'm also missing an easy workaround).

[adrianeboyd]

Maybe then it makes sense to redesign how the Config is used in weasel so that everything is put into a single top-level section and overrides are automatically adjusted?

[rmitsch]

Yes, I think that makes sense. Pinging @polm to get his opinion.

[polm]

I think it makes sense to have this as a feature if it's feasible to implement it. Putting everything in a single top-level section sounds like it makes sense, but won't that require rewriting all the sections in the config file?

It seems like a common workaround is to insert a filler section at the top, like [root], so that things outside a section end up in that. But then we would get weird errors if a user added a section with the same name.

[adrianeboyd]

I think this would just be for internal processing of the project config, so there isn't any danger of collisions? As in here:

https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/blob/03eebe9d1c79d39a632876205e93f023fc096d85/spacy/cli/_util.py#L135

[rmitsch]

...but won't that require rewriting all the sections in the config file?

We can either add a level of hierarchy altogether or gather all top-level attributes in one made-up section and treat that as a special case? I'm leaning towards the former.

[adrianeboyd]

Oh, it is already put into "project", hmm. Then I'd have to look again at how the overrides are done.

[polm]

OK, I see what's going on. What it currently does is read in the config, then create a new object where the config is under the key "project", and then goes from there. So the rewriting is part of the normal serialization process, and because default values aren't written out it doesn't change anything. That happens here:

https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/blob/03eebe9d1c79d39a632876205e93f023fc096d85/spacy/cli/_util.py#L195

[rmitsch]

Shall we close this and open an issue for weasel instead?