Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8

[Vladimir Vukicevic <vladimir pobox com>]

Jan Morén wrote:
> Third, and practically, if I already have a DB installed and running for
> other reasons (MySQL, just for the sake of discussion), the last thing I
> want is to have to care and feed _another_ DB server just because people
> on d-d-l had different preferences.
>
> Let Markus run Postgres, let Jamie run Firebird, let me run MySQL, and
> perhaps have SQlite as the default, built-in provider in case no DB is
> actually installed by the user?

Requiring any full-featured RDBMS for the desktop sounds quite wrong. 
I'm not sure what the situation is with Firebird, but for Postgres and 
MySQL, it's a system-wide service, not a per-user service -- having to 
administer this ominous database thing for the desktop seems like 
massive overkill.  What happens if I want to later use postgres for my 
own things, and I decide to change its config settings -- does gnome 
stop working because I changed the auth types?  Do I have to run a 
second instance of postgres|mysql|etc?  When a user wants to move their 
home directory elsewhere, do they have to remember to dump the gnome 
tables from postgres, too?

Looking at Firebird, it seems to be embeddable, along with SQLite.  If 
the desktop needs an RDBMS, it should probably be a per-user gnome 
specific daemon that embeds some RDMBS at the back end.  Use gnome-db to 
access it, but set Firebird or equivalent as the minimum required 
feature set -- there still will be incompatabilities, especially if 
stored procedures are used.  The db can then live in the home directory 
and get created along with the normal ~/.gnome* population, and be used 
just for gnome.  SQLite's a great choice, but it's fairly weak as far as 
"extra" SQL features goes -- do you really need stored procedures on the 
desktop, though?

	- Vlad