摘要：Distributed software systems are playing increasingly important roles in the world of software engineer-ing. Software systems are becoming larger and large-scale systems are naturally distributed. In the spirit of software "re-use" and software "evolution", "configurable distributed systems" are becoming the center of attention. A number of researchers have developed "configuration management systems" and "config-uration languages" for describing, constructing, and managing configurable distributed systems. I believe that a pause is in order, at this point, to analyze and review the current state of the research in this area.This paper presents a set of features and requirements expected from a configuration language and reviews some of the existing configuration languages. Specifically, the configuration languages of Conic and its successors, Polylith, LOTOS as a configuration language, Raven, MetaH, Durra, and Argus are reviewed. The paper establishes a basis for the review by proposing a list of requirements, reviews the languages on the basis of these requirements, and concludes with a summary and some final remarks
