My actual requirements are pretty simple:

• All jobs on Continuous Integration can be easily configured to use the same trending settings
• All jobs on Public Dashboard can be easily configured to use the same trending settings (we use the build-publisher plugin to push some of our jobs from CI to the dashboard)
• Make this possible for PMD and my own custom (AppScan) subclass of the hudson.plugins.analysis.core.PluginDescriptor (these are the only two analysis-core plugins we use at this time)
• Possible (lower priority) requirement - in some cases we may want to have custom settings for some jobs

Your suggestion to have a global configuration would be perfect for what I really need at this time. If the "*.txt" file doesn't exist, it could fall back on the global configuration. Because I have created my own PluginDescriptor, it would be nice if the global configuration could apply across all extensions, or else make it very easy for me to hook into that global config.

This feature makes not only sense for graphs but also for all other aspects of the plug-ins.