Re: gconf backend

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 05:50, Michael Meeks wrote:
> 	Any chance of the patch that glups together small, scattered %gconf.xml
> files into larger ones going in ? [ AFAIR it was perhaps not always
> clear at what depth to best do this but ... ].

Where is the patch? (Languishing in bugzilla no doubt...)

There are two obvious issues:

 - if we change the config format there's a big migration PITA
   for user settings, and you lose sharing them between GNOME versions

 - if you glup together _all_ the files you get a pretty big
   file (Evolution alone is around a megabyte of settings).
   You have to resave this whole file every time you change anything. 
   It feels a bit unscalable to me, and subject to losing _all_ your 
   settings in one go if anything goes wrong

If we change the config file layout I would like to fix the XML format
at the same time - sadly, the XML library used is not the major
XML-related problem IMHO, the larger problem is that the "DTD" is
horrifying.

See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/plans.html - one of the goals is
to make gconf more scalable to allow real data like address book in
there - I would be concerned that one huge file is counter to this
objective.

Perhaps someone could invent a scheme where files are split up based on
size, like "if a subtree contains >N kilobytes then split it" - but that
sounds hard to implement.

Havoc