Conceptually the backend configuration should be validated when creating
or opening the backend, but not when filling in information from
environment variables into the configuration.
In order to change the backend initialization in `global.go` to be able
to generically call cfg.ApplyEnvironment() for supported backends, the
`interface{}` returned by `ParseConfig` must contain a pointer to the
configuration.
An alternative would be to use reflection to convert the type from
`interface{}(Config)` to `interface{}(*Config)` (from value to pointer
type). However, this would just complicate the type mess further.
The Test method was only used in exactly one place, namely when trying
to create a new repository it was used to check whether a config file
already exists.
Use a combination of Stat() and IsNotExist() instead.
This enables the backends to request the calculation of a
backend-specific hash. For the currently supported backends this will
always be MD5. The hash calculation happens as early as possible, for
pack files this is during assembly of the pack file. That way the hash
would even capture corruptions of the temporary pack file on disk.
Michael Eischer