In the discussion around WT-1010, one thing that became clear is that managing the persistent configuration of WiredTiger database is non-trivial. There are some settings that should not be changed once a database is created (e.g., logging), others where it really only makes sense for the application to configure them (e.g., async), and some that can be changed at will (cache size, statistics, etc.).

One thing that might help users navigate this complexity is a wt config utility that can update the WiredTiger.config file. See the git-config(1) manual page for a complex example, or sysctl(8).

This is not a high priority, and there are open questions about how best to implement it, given that there is no programmatic interface to read or write a config file. The permitted keys are in dist/api_data.py, and we can get basic validation via __wt_config_check, but that isn't sufficient on its own to ensure that the combined configuration is valid (so that the database can be opened).