Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8

[Robert Love <rml ufl edu>]

On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 19:11, Rob Adams wrote:
> So should gconf be deprecated in favor of Storage?  Or perhaps
> reimplemented using a Storage backend?  (Long term, obviously)

No, I don't think so.

> It would certainly be cool to be able to do things like type into a box
> "launch the application I set to have a blue background yesterday
> afternoon".

Gconf is well suited to key/value pairs as used in application
properties.

Using Storage to store strongly-typed well-formed data is what Storage
would be good for.  See WinFS.  It makes a lot of sense to use Storage
(or something similar, again see WinFS) to store data such as address
book entries.

What the goal of Storage, WinFS, etc. is is to decouple the data from
the structure of the file.  Right now, complex data formats essentially
recreate file system structure inside of each file.  The filesystem
should be the ultimate storage medium.  To realize this, and have
everything-as-a-file and one-thing-per-file, we need a much smarter
filesystem.  WinFS can natively understand complex concepts such as
"address book entries" in a very simple and clean way, because the file
system itself implements structure and typing.

	Robert Love