Re: Life, the Universe and GConf

[Ali Akcaagac <ali akcaagac stud fh-wilhelmshaven de>]

On 2001.07.29 21:50:41 +0200 M . Thielker wrote:
> I think things got a bit confused here a while back - the described error is
> caused by gtkhtml needing GConf, not Balsa needing it.

yeah understand your previous message.

> As complicated as I gather GConf is, I'm not in favor of moving Balsa to it
> just yet. I, personally, like flat text config files, because I can go in
> and change things by hand quite easily.

exactly thats what i and many users think too.

> However, we also must start thinking about the future of Gnome and Balsa.

yes.

> There will be a new generation of users, they will not be programmers, most
> likely they wouldn't know how to set up and configure a Linux machine as we
> do now.

why would these people decide for linux then ? linux, bsd, unix are what they
are a complicated system for experts only.

> They will be former Windows users who run a mostly automated setup program
> to get a machine configured without actually knowing how it's done. They
> don't care about text configuration files, either, because they wouldn't
> know what to do with one if they knew were it was.

they should stay on windows then. if they dont want to learn these complex
things then linux is probably the wrong system for them, besides mentioned
that there is not only windows. a bunch of them come from amiga, mac and
other systems.

> They want powerful applications that remember everything, just like they
> have in Windows today. There is a huge amount of data that may need to be
> stored on a per app basis, it may be too much for text files to handle
> efficiently any more.

how should the solution look like ?

> I still don't think that Gnome should adopt something akin to the Windows
> Registry, that big heap of manure. After all, 80% of irrecoverable (by user
> means) Windows bork-ups are caused by inconsistent data in the registry.

why does something like gnome need a registry at all ? gconf is supposed to
store configuration data only, no REGISTRY stuff as windows did. unix was
successfull the past 30 years and even longer, also without some borkage
like gconf.

> A solution must be found, but it can't be as space- and inode-wasting as GConf
> seems to be. It also shouldn't be as opaque as the registry in Windows. I
> believe that there will be major changes when GConf starts messing up, and
> that Balsa should move there once the bugs are out.

well oki i would agree if they change the way gconf operates now but i dont
think they will change it. besides mentioned that your program doesnt do save
of preferences or configs, it sents all stuff to the gconf daemon that does
this for you.. looks funny if gconf daemon crashes or xfree crashes.

> However, we will have to mess with it, indirectly, because gtkhtml needs it.

yes ? i dont want to mess with it thats why i start complaining about it now.
shutting the mouth and saying nothing wont change anything. the best way is to
reach a wide area of people and tell them how their homedir will look like in
e.g. 6 months or earlier. who says that gconf is the right way ? the 20 core
developers that thought about that messy system on G2 or the 2000 people using
gnome ?... i saw a couple of developers stopped their development on gnome and
3rd party applications because of this.

> We don't have to embrace it and conform to it, that's what I say.

sure no problem.

-- 
Name....: Ali Akcaagac
Status..: Student Of Computer & Economic Science
E-Mail..: mailto:ali.akcaagac@stud.fh-wilhelmshaven.de
WWW.....: http://www.fh-wilhelmshaven.de/~akcaagaa