I've endlessly debated with myself about this and have come to the conclusion there isn't really a good solution and the best choice is probably put as much in an actual file as possible.
environment is sort of leaky and non-obvious . at least with a file there is something that is written somewhere that can be inspected and passed as an argument or as an environment variable. The only real positive I see with environment is that children of the process group basically get it for free, but that can be a negative in it of itself as well.
If I have to pick between environment and arguments as configuration, I'd probably prefer arguments since the application would have to explicitly iterate over all the arguments and handle them in some manner, like assign them to some structure or global internal to the program.
If I have to pick between environment and arguments as configuration, I'd probably prefer arguments since the application would have to explicitly iterate over all the arguments and handle them in some manner, like assign them to some structure or global internal to the program.